In a Hazelnut

Housekeeping

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:39:41 -0600

1. All Aboard. Recreation on Wednesday was special: the Common Room was filled with luggage from the attic! For people who rarely go anywhere, we have managed to accumulate an awful lot of travel items. There were attaché cases, backpacks of varying complexities, matched sets of floppy luggage, bags and sacks, valises, small suitcases, even a magazine carrying-case. Some of these things were old and smacked of more elegant travel days, others of bad buys. The Warden rummaged through each item to see what was left in it—alas, some travel sickness pills, 50 cents and enumerable paper clips was the total haul. We tried to identify which piece of luggage had been left behind by whom, which used thereafter by whom, where the travelers had gone and why. Some of the stories were most likely apocryphal, but they made for a lively time and gave our newcomers a feel for our past. The pieces which were most likely to be useful were taken back to the attic, other pieces were put in the garage ready for pick-up by a charity organization, and a few were consigned to the trash can.

2. Medicine. In our vigilance to maintain enclosure, our monastery limits the reading of on-line newspapers to the after-supper free time. But since that reduction doesn’t seem to have been effective enough towards our ideal, we have turned to homeopathic remedies: we have subscribed to the Sunday New York Times!
I am genuinely interested in the arts and in good critical writing, so my favorite sections of the paper are Arts & Leisure, the Book Review and the Magazine. But in the printed paper the tone of the articles is skewed, the text swamped, by the surrounding advertisements shouting extravagantly “buy this, talk about this book, go to this movie, be seen at this play, dress like this celebrity”. All the hype reduces genuine interest to a desperate curiosity about what is going on and, in my own case, a curiosity that cannot be satisfied—I do not go out and I have no money to spend. By extension, the nightly clicking of my mouse represents the same thing: a zeal to be au courant in a setting where fulfillment is a fantasy. In other words, acedia pure and simple. I don’t need to know that, to see this, to find out the other, because that is NOT what I am about now. I have deliberately chosen to live here at Julian House and I can’t have my cake and eat it too. The Sunday Times is permitted to linger on the Common Room windowsill all week long. The neatness of the sections would indicate that no one has availed themselves of the opportunity to pick it up and read. So—just what the doctor ordered!

3. A Helping Hand. We had noticed that the wrappers in our Recreation candy box seemed a little ruffled but only until a neat hole had been eaten through the box itself and the wrappings bitten through was the presence of the mouse made clear. We are not allowed to eat candy during Lent—and our friend has strengthened our resolve by clearing out the box ahead of time. Many thanks, little guy!

February 4th

Sat, 7 Feb 2009 15:38:12 -0600

February 4th [542; 02-08-09]

It was happenstance that I was Clothed as a Novice on February 4th, the feast of St. Cornelius the Centurion, the first Gentile Christian—the date simply suited the timetable of the other postulant who would be sharing the Clothing ceremony with me. But when I read over the story in Acts with some attention, I was extraordinarily attracted to Cornelius. The first attraction was literary: Luke’s skilled management of the two stories of Cornelius and Peter, especially his mastery of the time-and-distance factor involved in bringing them together and to completion.

Next I was struck with Cornelius’s personality. He was courageous in being a God-fearing Roman citizen while holding down a responsible position in the Roman army. He trusted the angelic messenger’s instructions: the angel said do this and he did it. He had no hesitation in instructing his servants and the orderly to set out at three o’clock in the afternoon to walk the thirty miles from Caesarea Maritima to Joppa—no apologies for the trouble he was putting them to. He trusted that Simon Peter would in fact take his invitation seriously and go the thirty miles back again with these three men in order to visit the house of a Gentile member of the occupying army. He had no notion that Peter would be receiving a spiritually transforming vision so as to make this breach of Judaic law possible—he just knew that Peter would in fact come. So confident was Cornelius that this would happen that he called together his relatives and friends to be present at the exact time when Peter would arrive, ready and waiting to hear the promised instruction which God would offer through him.

But all this attraction was summed up for me in Cornelius’s words to Peter. After he tells Peter about his vision, he says “So I sent for you immediately, and you have been kind enough to come.” Courage, trust, confidence—and graciousness. You have been kind enough to come. You have been kind enough to come. You have been kind enough to come. These words became a mantra for me.

Under the influence of St. Cornelius, all my monastic vows took place on February 4th. Courage, trust, confidence: in the power of monastic formation to take my life and make something of it. Admiration for the graciousness of my Community in assenting to my wish to persevere—and just possibly a tiny increase in my own ability to be gracious (I’ve written about this challenge in several of these little pieces).

Courage, trust and confidence are enormously important in monastic formation and the transformation which arises from it. The traditional monastic practices have a way of seeming either too slight or too counter-intuitive to bear any weight, but this is amazingly not the case. The Novice Promises and the First and Second Annual Vows are time-limited commitments made with courage, trust and confidence that all this “old stuff” still works. Oh, yes, it does indeed work—and carries on working year after year. February 4th 2009 happened to be our DAY IN, so I had ample time to re-read, to ponder and to give thanks for every moment of all these years so profitably and interestingly spent.

Upstairs, Downstairs

Sun, 1 Feb 2009 15:44:14 -0600

With our House calming down after anxieties, excitements and an unusual amount of hard work, it is soothing to hear that one of our chief monastic projects for the next two months is the inventorying and clearing out of our attics and basement. What a lot of obscure treasures may lie hidden among the heaps in both places! This is an old house for the area (1849) and I like to fantasize that there might be genuinely historical valuables hastily shoved under the floor boards or thrown into a corner.

Calling vividly to mind the full extent of one’s house—its highest and lowest reaches—is a useful image for the spiritual life. St. Teresa’s Interior Castle of course springs first to mind; but I have always loved Evelyn Underhill’s House of the Soul, which very practically brings down the saint’s magnificent edifice into an ordinary Edwardian townhouse, for Underhill wrote the book for her own housekeeper. For a healthy spiritual life, both women insist on making the house a unity: body and soul, upstairs and downstairs. It may be tempting to stay in the upper rooms and shut the door on domestic disasters; but if the kitchen stove down below won’t heat up properly even the most spiritual person is going to notice as a simple observation that cold food has replaced hot.

Body and soul both need looking after. At different times, however, the needs of body and soul may shift back and forth. I often think that the soul is sometimes treated by our modern culture like an unwanted child, confined to a cold attic and neglected. The child may cry out for release and for its proper sustenance but is not heard because the inhabitants are out having a good time. More rarely, the body may be straitjacketed into a regimen—either of excess or of privation—which prevent it from acting as the useful support to the soul that it ought to be. Simple but careful observation is required to achieve a healthy balance.

I am wondering today about the status of that “simple observation”: is this useful concept an upstairs servant or a downstairs servant? It is possible to observe with considerable particularity: to observe the “body” and yet consider the “soul” and to observe the “soul” and not neglect the fact of the “body”. At the moment it seems to me that getting the proportion of particularity right is the problem, not striving for some unreachable state of blandness. To compare the problem with lectio: all Scripture is inspired by God but this does not equal blandness, since in lectio God may for one’s especial benefit particularize even the smallest preposition, giving the passage a highlight never suspected before.

In the same way, is it not possible to say with complete sincerity “that Bacon Explosion smells delicious” without in any way being needled with desire to have a slice. Or to admit that “so-and-so is desirable” without in any way desiring him or her, or even awakening memories of former desire or desirables. Or to admit that “so-and-so behaved badly” when that is in fact perfectly true. These are simple facts, not aspersions or judgments, observed by the body and based indeed upon experience but from which desire has been unhitched. What is their status in the unified house?

Fireworks

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 15:04:50 -0600

Two blocks down the road from the monastery is a big high school. A few blocks southeast from the school is a public park. Both places occasionally celebrate with fireworks. But never before has there been such impeccable timing as on Friday night. As we stepped out of the door of the Chapel after Compline—boom, flash, sparkle, bang: we were greeted with the startup of a fireworks display. “Ooooooooo,” I thought, “is this what it feels like to be rich and famous—all those paparazzi with their flashes and clicks every time you stick your nose out of the door!” Despite the almost-zero temperature I had to stay outside and watch the display. I thought it was a particularly beautiful presentation, including bursts with lots of blue flames spiraling upwards which I had never seen before.

Julian House is having its own “fireworks” week. On Saturday at Evening Prayer we had a Novice Clothing; and our Postulant took up residence with us, to be conducted into Choir on the Feast of St. Paul’s Conversion (now those were some fireworks for sure!). On Tuesday (the commemoration of St. John Chrysostom whose golden tongue we invoke for our proceedings), we have our Annual General Chapter into whose preparation a vast amount of work has been poured. And the very next day our Guardian goes to England for his two-month sabbatical. The day of his departure is the commemoration of St. Thomas Aquinas, that minutely careful thinker. Whether St. Thomas investigated the problem (which any mother of small children knows) that it is MUCH more exhausting to make plans to have an afternoon out than just carry on with the relentless routine of staying home, I don’t know—but we are sure that our Guardian will see his way through the conundrum so as to profit from his time away.

And most appropriately for this flame burst of activity on our part, we have been sharing the Chapel with the crew from the solar-energy installation company—clad like polar explorers on the snowy roof, they were working (as it were) with “fire” in bitterly cold temperatures. The idea of harnessing the sun as he comes forth from his pavilion so that his fiery light may become our electricity is very daring, no matter how sensible it may also be. The mythopoeic implications of all this overwhelm any science I may have learned and in fact seem the most satisfying way to think about the project.

The Novice Clothing ceremony has its own flames and helps all of us to renew our vision, to go back again to the “promises” which the Novice makes, above all to be ready for the Holy Spirit to “come down as the wind and cleanse us as the fire” in consecration. It is good to remember those elemental forces waiting to accept our willingness to “try to be open to conversion, ready to accept heavenly comfort when it is offered, and to be steadily filled up, heart and mind, to God’s great glory, now and for ever.”

Counting Things

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:37:36 -0600

It was Kanga, I believe, who woke up one morning feeling motherly, with a great need to count various homely things. Yes, there’s comfort in that. I sometimes get involved in discomforting calculations—“how old was so-and-so when he did such-and-such”—when I don’t know when he was born, and I have to make suppositions rather like casting one’s position by the sun, taking this, that, and the other factors into consideration as well.

The past few weeks have been a fruitful time for the psalms in my mind. At Julian House we say the psalms “in course”, according to the divisions into Morning and Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer. So how many times have I said these psalms—from January 6, 1990 to January 6, 2009—240, isn’t it? ONLY 240? It seems more. If I bothered to look up the Gradual Psalms, it would be a bit more; and it is possible to do that, thanks to handy tables made by people who also like to count things, but I shall resist it.

Surely it ought to have been possible to memorize all the psalms with that amount of repetition, but I haven’t been given that gift. When, the other day, I had running through my head the verse “in the shadow of your wings will I take refuge until this time of trouble has gone by”, I ought to have been able to identify it as Psalm 57, but I had to look that verse up in the concordance to track it down (quicker than fluttering through all the Psalter). And Psalm 57 is an Eleventh Morning psalm, too. Memorable because the second part of the Psalm (“wake up, my spirit; awake, lute and harp”) was the psalm which Grandfather started chanting in the Cathedral as Henrietta waited for him to tell God everything about Ferranti’s disappearance [Elizabeth Goudge, The City of Bells]—and so gives a date to the incident: Nov. 11th. A favorite book, a favorite morning: the Eleventh Day.

The Third Day Morning: Psalm 16 with its goodly heritage. A friend sent me a woodcut of a fine tabby cat basking on a window ledge, surveying its heritage and seeing that it was good. Third day, cat day.

Fourth Day Psalms are very special, since Feb. 4th is the anniversary of my Clothing and all my Vows. Psalm 19 with the sun coming out of its pavilion and running from uttermost edge to uttermost edge—the same uttermost parts where the soul tries to find refuge in Psalm 139. And of course in the evening the memory of the Easter Vigil in Psalm 22. Fourth Day: Commitment Day.

And the Twenty-seventh Day, the Psalms of Ascent. How I love those psalms! I chose to read them to Sr. Scholastica Marie just an evening before her death, holding her hand. When I got to v. 3 of Ps. 120 “what shall be done to you, and what more besides, O you deceitful tongue?”, she gave a great groan and I thought she didn’t want to hear any more. But after a few moments the slightest pressure on my hand told me to go on to the end “I still my soul and make it quiet”.

And of course the First Day “Happy are they who have not walked. . . .” and a whole month has passed. How could it have gone so quickly!

Inestimable Love

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:10:11 -0600

My last piece found me waiting. Today finds me recalling the thanks we gave to God in the Votive of Gratitude which signaled not only the end of our intense festive season but also a period of heightened inner activity. “He has shown me the wonders of his love in a besieged city.” Ps. 31 v.21b is also a good general description of our community’s inner vocation. Whether the siege is leveled against us for our vocation or whether my own personal preferences are under fire, the purpose is the same: we are undergoing the stress of self-knowledge on behalf of a world that is desperately besieged; and finding in our inner turmoil evidences of God’s instruction and God’s love which we can pass on to others in prayer.

Our Community is very serious about its practice of contemplative monasticism and it has had a prolonged spell of reflecting on its discernment procedures. In being courteously adaptable while its monastic instincts were being needled away at, the Community experienced the sort of chafing similar to that which a speck of rough stuff in the seam of an undershirt produces: the effort lies in not letting so small a thing influence one’s inner and outer behavior since it’s a lot of trouble to go change one’s undershirt once the full habit has been put on. But as time goes on the value of that effort shifts to become part of the needling-away movement itself: the Community relaxes its instincts to save itself trouble of changing its clothes. What is required then is practical measures: to go upstairs, take off that undershirt and have a good look at it—can it be fixed or not—and act accordingly. This new insight has to be offered in great humility but determination on behalf of those in the world who do not have that option for change.

Add to that subtle trial of the communal character the joyful discipline of the Twelve Days with its increased table celebration and the soothing bare-ness of our house transformed with decorations. The strain of this discipline was my own particular area of bombardment. Then add on the intense preparations of the Officers of the Community in getting records of the past year prepared for presentation at Annual Chapter and many other administrative matters that always coincide with the new year and the festive season. And my own projects: one in which I was a helper bore fine fruit; another involves hard work that produces more frustration than fulfillment. Towards the end of the Twelve Days, we had the pleasure of receiving a warm and affirming visit from our Bishop Visitor. With that visit and the Votive of Gratitude our siege is easing; and all of us can see how much we have learned as a Community through it, things we wouldn’t have been able to learn otherwise.

It is particularly delightful to me that the Collect for Votives of Gratitude is the General Thanksgiving from Morning Prayer. It was my favorite piece of liturgy when I was a child at the Chapel of the Cross, gathered with all the other Sunday School students in the east transept. Even the temptation to be silly in pronouncing “inestimabababable love” couldn’t spoil it. Now, four times a year we get to offer thanks and praise here in the Chapel of the Crown of Thorns through this wonderful prayer. The Cross, The Crown of Thorns. . .and humble and hearty thanks.

Family

Sun, 4 Jan 2009 11:29:58 -0600

The Twelve Days of Christmas are still making their stately progress towards The Epiphany. Secular time flashed into the procession, turning 2008 into 2009. Where on earth did the year go? At least, 2009 is a nice, comfortable number and easy to remember. The discipline of the Twelve Days is strenuous: if one includes the two Sundays along with the other feasts, only four of the Twelve do not have Refectory celebration. That’s a lot of food and a lot of conversation to be got through graciously.

So First Friday was a wonderful treat of silence. I put the thurifer’s stool in front of the creche in the chapel and sat there, gazing at the Holy Family. What do I make of it? What does it tell me? According to the customs of the time and place, the burden of any conversation with shepherds, townspeople and kings would have fallen on Joseph rather than Mary, and considering the holy couple’s poverty, it seems unlikely that sweetmeats would have been offered to the guests. Attentive but not vigilant, Mary stored up what she saw and heard and pondered it. Those attitudes fit well with waiting, a task she already did well. Joseph, aided by the angel’s advice, knew he had to be both responsible and adaptable and was standing by. Admirable parents!

The small baby in his little manger reminded me more of Moses in his rush basket than Baby Jesus usurping the big crib of straw from the ox. But this bambino doesn’t seem intense enough to grow up to be the person who will draw people out of the egypt of their sins into the kingdom of God. But you never know—then or now. My own family came to my mind: my brother and sister and I, my brother’s four children, my sister’s four children, my one—how strangely different all of those children were in their personalities even though all are still stamped with a visual resemblance. They shared experiences, to be sure, but what different uses those experiences were put to. And how the use of experience changes with increasing age. Brilliance mutating into seemingly drab familiarity, an appreciation of the dull, of lack of variety, of routine. Are those “elderly” things on the same order as silence—counterintuitively attractive? low-key things which have to be seriously experienced to see the worth of? The talking points between drabness and brilliance are not always easily accomplished; and from that arises a perfectly natural sadness because each side had hoped to be able to help the other. Sociological explanations and practices don’t really help that sadness—and perhaps shouldn’t do so, for it has to be a yearning acceptance, something to be stored up and pondered and allowed to germinate.

The Holy Family were not sweetness-and-light. At first glance our creche says: Mary loves her baby and Joseph is rapt in admiration. But both Mary and Joseph had been warned and could sense that strangeness was present. As I sit on my stool, I sense it strongly. High up on the wall behind the altar is the crucifix in the almost dark. On the altar in the golden monstrance is the Blessed Sacrament. At the foot of the altar the nativity scene. And gathering it all up all around, silence, silence, silence. . . .waiting.

Rime and Rain

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:36:58 -0600

As we walked over to Still Prayer on the Feast of St. Stephen, the rising temperature and the snow cover were producing a thick fog. Oh, goodie, I thought: there’ll be rime (frozen fog) in the morning. Which of course brought to mind the old poem “The Ruin”, appropriate not just for its atmospheric effects but for the relentless passage of time—the “ruin” of the year as the days count down to the 31st.

For a group of people who have no need to go out, rime makes beautiful vistas, and it will not bring down branches or power lines. It is a gift of sheer and unusual beauty: our three colored wreaths seen through gauze; the candles in the windows blurred; the driveway stretching off into the future. But unlike the buildings in the poem, our house is not in ruins. We are warm, we are feasting, we are celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas, and our Habits smell delightfully of woodsmoke, because we have an ongoing fire in the Refectory fireplace. The dark and the light recall Bede’s story of the sparrow, momentarily warm and sheltered as it flies through the feasting hall from the rimey cold outside and then back out into the chill bleakness again. But we here are sheltered by our Community, gathered safely under its wings, while the Order itself is guided by the sure hands of the Holy Spirit—no pagan darkness here!

I feel the security of those wings and hands strongly at the start of the day. Crossing from the monastery to the chapel at 4:50 a.m. on the Feast of St. John, there is in fact no romantic frozen fog to distract with its beauty. It’s in the 40s and it’s just plain old raining. We find shelter in the dimly lit Choir, a warm dry place after a damp walk. We put our chant books onto our stall tops—for we are about to begin God’s Work—and we wait in silence to turn on our lights at the Guardian’s signal. That silence, that unity of preparedness to take up the tasks for which we came here, the sheer holiness of this great room, binds us all together. I find those minutes before Morning Prayer the most wonderful of our whole day and every morning I thank God for bringing me here.

Four days until the end of 2008! The habit of looking back over the year and making New Year’s Resolutions is hard to ignore. The resolutions are the same old same old. But the looking back is always instructive, a sort of “spiritual Christmas letter” that one writes to oneself. Has it been a happy, gung-ho year? No. Was the year a ruin? No. But it certainly was a grey year and charity was too often coated over with a chill coating of rime. However, the sense of being personally instructed and borne with by the Spirit was strong, as was the patient waiting presence of our courteous Lord, sitting in on the practicum and by a gentle pressure reminding me that it still had to get worse before it could get better. And yet also reminding me that my soul is an honorable city, not a ruin, in which He dwells and where he keeps me full safely whether in falling or in rising. Grey is OK.

Gifts

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 11:19:43 -0600

We are covered in snow and icicles. The snow decorates the outside doors and storm windows, and the icicles fringe the eaves. There’s no need to buy spray-on snow and a fringe of icicle-lights at Julian House! Even the big ash tree by the porch is dressed in a white garment of snow thrown up against it by the snow blower—it holds out its arms, saying “just look at me!”—if it could twirl, it would.

The UPS truck makes daily trips, bringing us gifts to unwrap on Christmas Eve after the Vigil Mass. People are so kind to us! At the moment, the boxes are stacked up in a corner of the Parlor or taken down to the cool of the basement, awaiting the appearance of the Christmas tree on the 23rd. Waiting gifts. Quiescent gifts.

“What can I offer?” The little drummer boy beats his drum, the little boy juggles before the Christ Child—“what can I bring?” It is the season for gifts. Christmas carols and seasonal songs urge all of us not to be ashamed if our gifts seem small, for they are nonetheless precious and will be well-received. And we are urged by our parishes, and certainly by our culture, to share our gifts all year long. “Do something.”

“What have I got to offer?” can take on too much urgency in the minds of people who might be thinking of a vocation to a contemplative monastery. “I can cook, I can sing, I’m good at numbers, I know how to fix plumbing, I’m a skilled programmer, I can write, I have a Ph.D. in theology”. Certainly all those things are useful and can be put to good use. But none of those are THE gift that has to be there for a contemplative vocation to manifest itself. The inner gift of being able to wait, of being able to accept quiescence, of just persevering through the days without discouragement is the crucial attribute. One may in fact spend all morning clearing out the basement drain and be pleased that one has managed to save the Community a whopping plumbing bill, but the real gift is the realization that one can wait days, weeks, months quite contentedly without the Roto-rooter, using as tools only the scripture, liturgy, silent prayer and Community interactions which make up the monastic day.

Those four tools are very efficient, but one’s own offering in their use is simply perseverance. The actual results will be brought about by God working now delicately, now devastatingly through the perseverance. A person who understands this gift of waiting, of perseverance, this toleration of quiescence, is usually instantly recognizable by the Community. “The monastic instinct”, we call it; or, jokingly, “a low entertainment threshold”.

In fact, this rather peculiar gift is a key: “I have set before you an open door which no one can shut.” And through that door shines the Light. However distant it may seem on any one day, it is worth waiting for.