What is real.

I find very little more encouraging than watching the people in my country abandon stubborn political cynicism and "what's in it for me" attitudes by walking straight into a disaster like Oklahoma to help each other for nothing in return.

What that tells me is that deep inside, we all know that the picture cast by politics and commercials is neither important nor real.

When our eyes are open, for however brief the moment, we remember what is real. Love is real. Senseless, selfless, tireless love is the only thing that is real.

A Lesson from Creation in Mexico: Greed will eat you alive.

 Let him neglect nothing and let him not give way to avarice

Chapter 31

Some time ago my husband and I spent the day in Isla Mujeres while honeymooning on the Mexican coast (think 007 Thunderball). When our boat pulled up to dock we saw a water pin holding two Bull sharks. As it turns out, this man had created a little business and by keeping them fed, he would pick the sharks up out of the water for people to take pictures while the creatures clearly gasped for "air." Being raised in the home of a zoologist, I was totally unnerved by this spectacle and called my dad from our  hotel just to tell him about it and to see if I was going to have to talk my darling new husband into Mission: "Shark Freedom." But what my dad told me instead was my first lesson in the kind of justice that weaves itself through our natural world:
 

"Don't worry about it, Tarah."
 

"Why not?!"
 

"Because that guy probably started with 1 shark, got greedy and found another to double his money. He'll get a third, that's how greed works."
 

"So?"
 

"Well once you reach three, there is no amount of food you can give that many sharks that will suppress their instinct to hunt."
 

"Oh."
 

"So in the end his greed will literally eat him alive, I am certain."
 

"So I shouldn't worry because there will soon be a shark reckoning."
 

"Something like that. It'd be a shame to take that moment from them."
 

"You're right. I love nature."
 

"Me too."

Sometimes praying in public doesn't seem like praying at all.

In community, however, let prayer be very short,
and when the Superior gives the signal let all rise together.

Chapter 20: On Reverence and Prayer

Praying in public. It is an activity that always draws my attention, if not only for the reason that sometimes praying in public doesn't seem like praying at all. I even go so far as to call it something a bit self-aggrandizing at times. A speech with your eyes closed. A rhetorical moment, hands clasped.

There is an artist on display at a gallery very close to us. Her work is quite impressive indeed: giant, 20 ft tall charcoal sketches of people. The realism is beautiful--but the words accompanying her work are even better.

I'm sure we have all been to an exhibit that has as much explanation as it does art. This has always rubbed me the same way as those particular kinds of prayers in public: it is as if the artisan is trying to control the manner in which the audience connects. There is a lack of faith in that kind of heavy direction accompanying art.  I believe this case of over explained art is the same as over killed prayer. Both are an attempt to control the other, the present moment, and the outcome.

With the exhibit at hand, however, just a single word accompanies each charcoal piece: the subject's first name. It was the only explanation this artist felt we needed to understand the sketches of the people in front of us, a project that had taken her months and months to complete.

Her choice was one of trust. She trusted that we would see deeply enough into the likeness of the person pictured before us and experience it fully. She trusted we would understand without direction, guidance, or rhetoric.

There are times when our prayers could learn from this artist. 
  

Lent and the 5 Lessons of Discarded Objects

Let this verse be said:
"Incline unto my aid, O God;
O Lord, make haste to help me," 

Chapter 18: In What order the Psalms are to be Said

I throw so much stuff away. I have always thought of it as a way to prove to myself that I never need a thing as much as I do the living parts of my life. And at least in the realm of self-help books and sort-of-help television shows, throwing stuff away is akin to the final stage of some kind of consumer enlightenment in the modern world. The answer seems to be that in order to become what we envision, we will in fact have to rent a gigantic dumpster bin and physically rid ourselves of the possessions we find no longer useful, relevant, or in style. 

But something might be terribly wrong with this message, namely, that our answer lies in our willingness to rent a dumpster. We are, after all, the same people who purchased, received and made all this stuff, aren't we? And in the end, isn't the reason for ridding ourselves of this stuff so that we can get new stuff? I sense a vicious cycle...I may be in it right now.

Enter: trash pickers turned puppet makers.

There is a play called "Rubbish" on at the arts centre across the street. The story is of a man who rummages through our trash for all supplies to make fantastical puppets. The beauty of it all is what he sees as potential in these objects. It's a wonderful kind of lesson to sit in on--and from it I've been inspired to reflect on what I believe are 5 lessons of discarded objects.

1. Paper is paper.
We do not need fresh spiral notebooks and journals and steno pads to keep our lists and thoughts and dreams-- do we? Every envelope has a blank side, every front a back. What rule is there that we cannot write upon those surfaces? 

2. Labels are a lie.
They always have been, of course, and we spend most of our time speaking about the damaging aspect of labels in an abstract sense. But labels also define how we use objects and what appears useful to us anymore. A Jar that says "tea" is still a jar for anything else isn't it? So is the one that says "Cotton," and "Handsoap" and whatever else Target decides to name.

3. Trash never disappears.
It only goes somewhere else and unfortunately, on the grand scale of electronic waste and toxic waste, it often goes somewhere people live who are too poor to live anywhere else. Truthfully, we cannot actually throw our trash away. Someone somewhere is still living with our trash.

4. Remember the artist's mind.
We must think in a no-trash manner. Homes and lives are ever evolving and our things can evolve with us if only we remember the artist's mind within us all. We must think outside of the big bin and the big box store and re-imagine the value of our discarded things--there are so many inspiring examples of this on the web alone.  Search "re-use" and see how the imagination overcomes the illusion of meaningless trash.

5. We cannot throw ourselves away. 
We never could. There is a deep theology to this truth, one that reclaims in us the purpose of Lent. This time in the wilderness that is our own lives is not one for cleaning out our souls--but rather accepting that these are in fact, our souls. No matter how damaged or torn, we cannot simply swap them for new ones. We cannot send them away or even bury them deep in the ground. But we can pray. We can always pray.

Incline unto my aid, O God. O Lord, make haste to help me.

Spending Lent eradicating the thorns in my treacherous new yard without bleeding to death.

The Morning and Evening Offices
should never be allowed to pass
without the Superior saying the Lord's Prayer
in its place at the end
so that all may hear it,
on account of the thorns of scandal which are apt to spring up.
Thus those who hear it,
being warned by the covenant which they make in that prayer
when they say, "Forgive us as we forgive,"
may cleanse themselves of faults against that covenant.

Chapter 13 How the Morning Office is to be Said on Weekdays

In the past few weeks we've moved house and along with this new space comes a big garden...an overgrown, thorn-filled garden. It is so overgrown and neglected that thorny vines have overtaken what seems like every square inch of it. So this has become my most recent contemplative practice: eradicating the thorns in my treacherous backyard without bleeding to death.

How bizarrely appropriate for Lent.

And what is even more appropriate is the reading in the Rule from yesterday that warns of "the thorns which are apt to spring up" if the monastics neglect the daily habit of ingesting those words in the Lord's prayer that are so quickly hustled through but hold all the world in them: "Forgive us as we forgive."

What old men in a barber shop taught me about authenticity and being good to our planet.

The eighth degree of humility
is that a monk do nothing except what is commended
by the common Rule of the monastery
and the example of the elders.

Chapter 7: On Humility

 Growing up, I spent many afternoons in my grandfather's barber shop listening to old men talk about stuff. Of course not every exchange in that small town barber shop in the heart of Texas was a pearl of wisdom, to put it mildly,  but looking back it still humbles me how wise those old men were about some things.

Confessions of an ancient Thinker.

The fifth degree of humility
is that he hide from his Abbot none of the evil thoughts
that enter his heart
or the sins committed in secret,
but that he humbly confess them.

Chapter 7 On Humility 

 There is no hiding place from God, though I've managed in my life to find some very effective hiding places from myself. Today's reading in the Rule is about coming out from those hiding places into the plain light of honesty. This has me thinking about Augustine's Confessions. A friend once told me it was the most exposing thing her had ever read. I agree with him. The Confessions is so utterly honest at times it makes me feel as if this book has exposed even my own hiding places. Below is an excerpt from this ancient work which is still capable of coaxing a hiding modern soul out of the shadows. I always wonder if my confessions are as ever honest as this, as ever ruthlessly exposing to the agendas I've hidden far from myself.

God is not Thor. Or, how "the will of God" is a tragically misinterpreted phrase.

The second degree of humility
is that a person love not his own will
nor take pleasure in satisfying his desires,
but model his actions on the saying of the Lord,
"I have come not to do My own will,
but the will of Him who sent Me" (John 6:38).

Chapter 7: On Humility

I'm making Valentine cards to mail off to a few loved ones. Handling all these hearts along with the reading in the Rule today has me thinking about desire. It's a word only linked with love and wonder. It is also the other definition of theléma, which is the Greek word in the New Testament we translate into English as "will." What a mistake.

Thomas Aquinas, my dear champion of the humble observer.

"let us believe with the Prophet that God is ever present to us,
when he says to the Lord,
"Every desire of mine is before You" (Ps. 37[38]:10).

Chapter 7 On Humility

Today I celebrate the feast of Thomas Aquinas, the MIND of faith and reason. He was my first love when I began theological study because he professed with 10,000 some pages of careful writing that what we observe every day about our world points us to God and waits for us to take the risk of faith. My very favorite things he wrote were about the truths we garner from the use of our senses because according to Thomas our senses are "our only actual means to knowledge." Said another way, one does not ever truly know the world by reading about it.

the prayer for anxious souls.

The first degree of humility, then,
is that a person keep the fear of God before his eyes (Ps. 35[36]:2)
and beware of ever forgetting it.

Chapter 7 On Humility

 I've begun something--not sure what--making the knots of crochet. With these kinds of things I like to see what they become in the world of rectangle possibilities. Scarf, Afgan, Throw, whatever it will be I'll be here finishing it off.

I wish it was as easy to look at life as I do this brown and blue amorphous blob of knots in my lap.

But the truth is for the anxious soul, when life appears to take no rational and ordered form and looks exactly like this pile of knots in my lap, "seeing what becomes" simply translates to "waiting in fear." And the fears themselves are numerous but fall into two basic categories:

The fear that I will not go where I planned to go.
The fear that I will not be the person I planned to be.

Humility, Nihilism, and Limitless Love: An Orthodox priest's funeral homily for his suicidal son.

"Rather have I been of humble mind
than exalting myself;
as a weaned child on its mother's breast,
so You solace my soul" (Ps. 130).

Chapter 7 On Humility

I want to share the most moving and brilliant thing I have read in a long time. It is a sermon delivered by an Orthodox priest for the funeral of his son, who jumped to his death. No other introduction is needed; his work sings all on its own.

Kung Fu fighting, folding clothes, and learning how to pray.

"I was silent and was humbled, 

and I refrained even from good words (Ps 38)." 

Here the Prophet indicates that there are times 

when good words are to be left unsaid out of esteem for silence.

Chapter 6: On the Spirit of Silence

"Alert stillness." It's the phrase that best describes the 67 year old woman that was in my Kung Fu class. Another good one would be "terrifying." She was tiny and she never really talked at all. She didn't need to, she was there as a student. I was there as a student as well but it took me much longer to learn that my commentary--though hilarious--was not needed.

But back to the woman.

Sewing a skirt from bed covers because I survived the cat scratching succubus that was junior high.

"But this very obedience
will be acceptable to God and pleasing to all
only if what is commanded is done
without hesitation, delay, lukewarmness, grumbling, or objection."

Chapter 5: On Obedience

It's time to start planning the skirt I'll hand sew throughout Lent and wear for Easter. It's my annual gift to the 13 year old I used to be. I try to make her a skirt she would have loved. She loved stripes.

The reading today in the Rule has me thinking about my skirt in a new way. I'm thinking about obedience and how truly different it is--and even opposite to--conformity.

Conformity is what happens through social pressure; it is falling in with the norms of majority. This is, more than anything, the rule that dominates how to live in the world as a young person and for 13 year old me it was particularly sinister. She wanted to be this person that she knew very well in the respite of her room but to walk around with that skin exposed in the world of teenagers almost always guaranteed burns and cat scratches. She never seemed to learn how to avoid those wounds, though. Instead she just got really good at scarring over with promises to herself of an adulthood beyond the cat scratching succubus that was junior high.

The most obedient I've ever been was when I stole my neighbor's dog..

"put aside their own concerns, abandon their own will, and lay down whatever they have in hand, leaving it unfinished. With the ready step of obedience, they follow the voice of authority in their actions."

Chapter 5: On Obedience

I walked my dogs while reflecting on this portion of the Rule today and I was reminded of the first time I learned the difference between obedience and compliance. I need to be reminded of that difference in my adulthood, I think.

 When I was a teenager I stole the dog next door. It was a puppy and it was chained outside to the back door. For a few days I watched that dog use the bathroom, drink its water, and eat its food in a 2 foot space while leashed to a door.

I talked to my parents about it. They had me call the police and explain what I was seeing. The police told me the owner wasn't doing anything wrong. The owner had provided all that dog needed to live and was not breaking the law. I remember my Mom's face when she realized no one was coming to rescue this dog and that her daughter was not satisfied with the answer delivered by those who would have been an authority over this event.

By evening that puppy was in our living room.

Simone Weil and the choice between Pimm's and envy.

"67. do nothing out of envy."

Chapter 4:  What are the Instruments of Good Works.

There's a void in my cupboard. I didn't realize it until after I had already started mixing together a recipe literally called "Best Oatmeal Cookies," boldly named by a Merrie Wold. She says the most crucial part of her entire recipe is this step in the beginning: beat together the eggs and the raisins and the organic vanill--crap. I don't have the vanilla. Void created. 

It's times like these when I ask myself what Simone Weil would do. Simone Weil: 1930's French thinker-turned activist-turned Christian mystic-turned member of my league of heroes, who at the age of six cut sugar from her diet because she heard that the soldiers fighting in the war were enduring punishing food rations. Six. 

Simone wrote many things, but her book called Gravity and Grace never seems to run dry. "Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness," she said. She wrote often about emptiness, or more often what she called "the void."

the shadowlands.

"54. Not to speak useless words."

Chapter 4: What are the Instruments of Good Works.

While working on a wood block today I laughed to myself about how little I appreciate what a mystery actually is. I always profess my love for mystery novels, movies, and TV, but those are better called "A mystery until the case is solved." It is the latter half that usually gains my praise, the half where the mystery is unraveled into a pile of threads. I do like my mysteries, for sure. I guess I just like them explained to me in the end.

Yarn bombed a cathedral door this morning for my gay friends....

32. Not to curse those who curse us, but rather to bless them.

Chapter 4 What are the Instruments of Good Works

I am fascinated by old church doors. I think every cathedral we have seen since moving to England has a door I've photographed. The painstaking carvings, the metal work, the sheer time and skill involved makes them almost otherworldly. I will forever remember the doors of England.

A few days following the Church of England's vote against allowing women to be bishops, church doors seemed different to me. They remain magnificent--but it was only after that vote that I noticed that those doors, in all of their beauty, were closed.

This morning I went traipsing though a snow covered church garden as a short cut. I had this knitted red heart in my hand that I had made with every intention to attach it to an elderly woman's bicycle (see that post here).

But as is happens, I had read today's portion of the Rule and a particular line within it was already burning its place in me. It is the 32nd Instrument of Good works. The thing about this line is that it assumes you are, at present, cursed by someone. There is not an "if" there, nor is there is even a "when." The way that line is written is as if you have been cursed by someone your whole life.

Tiny bodies, first names, and the refusal to be reduced.

 "17. To bury the dead."
Chapter 4 What are the Instruments of Good Works.

Bury the Dead is a play that premiered on a New York stage in 1936. It was written by Irwin Shaw and the setting, written in the rubrics of the script, is "The second year of the war that begins tomorrow."  Both the setting and the characters often earn it the label: "anti-war drama."

To call it that, however, is an error which reveals much about how we tend to interpret the loss of life in our present day.

Turning to Cobwebs for Counsel in the Snow.

"Do everything with counsel,
and you will not repent when you have done it" (Eccles. 32:24).

Chapter 3 On Calling the Brethren for Counsel

The snow has come. Snow does two particular kinds of things that never seem compatible to my mind until I see them in the winter. First, snow softens the world, changing once concrete surfaces to cotton pallets and fence tops to frosted donuts. It blurs the landscape into endless shades of white which combine surfaces that are normally quite distinct- a sidewalk's elevation off a road, for instance, or a lawn from a path. It creates a world with different boundaries.

With all of that blurring of distinctions, however, snow also highlights what was once not noticed. Every plant skeleton is out on the finest display by a deep frost. It is as if their leaves were hiding the most true part--the most beautiful part of their form. And invisible things like cobwebs are all of the sudden the sparkling tinsel of nature, patterned across fences and decking trees. 

When these two kinds of things happen together in the winter, they remind me what snow does above all: it leaves our assumptions about humanity's place in the world laid bare before us all in a manner that is most telling.

Taking Communion with a Pink Horse named Pretty

"The reason we have said that all should be called for counsel
is that the Lord often reveals to the younger what is best."

Chapter 3: On calling the Brethren for Counsel

I want to tell a story--or a memory, rather. This story begins on a Sunday morning some few odd years ago when my husband and I still lived in Austin. We had taken up the habit of attending the "family communion" though I'm not sure we were exactly the target audience, as we have no children. But there was just something about the space we were in for that service and the ease with which the whole liturgy flowed. It seemed...organic.

This particular Sunday morning was boasting a fair amount of children all with pencils and stuffed whatzits and smeared face dolls all littering the floor beneath us. The music was the same, simple selections, the sermon a felt-board accompanied bit of wisdom, and the peace being passed included all familiar tones of voice from 3 years to 63. I remember the sun being particularly bright that day--one of its beams had managed to land on my knee while I sat and waited for communion to begin. 

To this day I'll never know if what happened next was yet another regular installment to the Sunday service I had somehow missed, or if it was, indeed, a story worthy moment for all. As we all began to shuffle our way toward the table, I fell in line behind a small girl--she must have been no older than 6 as she stayed quite close to her parents. In her right arm she cradled a pink stuffed horse with electric blue eyelashes. It's name, I heard her say, was "Pretty." Pretty had on a dress with angel wings. I'll never totally understand the logic in designing stuffed animals for kids, but I have to say that horse was totally fantastic. It was ridiculous, but fantastic.

Shepherds and Sheep

"...the constant apprehension about her
coming examination as shepherd (Ezech. 34)
concerning the sheep entrusted to her,
and her anxiety over the account
that must be given for others,
make her careful of her own record.
And while by her admonitions
she is helping others to amend,
she herself is cleansed of her faults."

Chapter 2 What Kind of Person the Abbess Ought to Be.

This lovely short film is by Jacob Griswold and Javi Zubizaretta and was submitted to the University of Notre Dame Student Film Festival 2009. It is the finest expression of what I read in the Rule today. 

Leaving my old Utopia with a Bag of problem yarns

Thus she must adjust and adapt herself to all.

Chapter 2 What Kind of Person the Abbess Ought to Be 

Yarns and fibers have an inherent kind of problem. The thing is, every yarn seems different in my hands and therefore requires something new from me--some flexibility and willingness to step back and learn how to make the same beautiful thing in a completely altered way. 

It makes me crazy. 

In fact, it makes me so crazy that if I wasn't reading this blasted Rule every day I wouldn't ever switch yarn. But as it is, I am in fact reading the Rule and not surprisingly it has something to say about my yarn problem: People aren't so different from yarn and my struggles with yarn aren't so different from my struggles with people.

I am perpetually fascinated that as a species, humanity has so many variations. We are a range of emotions, appearances, and logicians that comprise a miracle of existence. Visually this makes every person a varied landscape to study; it makes every person a new vision on the same walk to the train. But it also makes every person a complex ball of issues and needs that are different from my own, issues I must choose to hear in order to live together in peace. It is this element of difference at times that I find hard to deal with. Sometimes when tensions rise, I wish we were all the same. I suppose what I am trying to say is that difference is beautiful to my eye, but it is also exhausting for my ego.

Making thankyous and pondering the eloquence of Gandhi's Rebuke.

In her teaching
the Abbess should always follow the Apostle's formula:
"Reprove, entreat, rebuke" (2 Tim. 4:2)

Chapter 2 What Kind of Person as Abbess Ought to Be

Writing thank you notes today. This is an event that typically involves a table full of paper scraps, yarn and glue, and attempts at decent penmanship. Thank you notes are a tradition in this house--we have always written them--it's just something Brady and I grew up doing and continued.

Today's part of the Rule has me pondering the very practice of thank you note writing and making as something that could be extended into other kinds of exchanges not so praiseworthy. What if, say, after an argument with a loved one or after being the receiving end of hurtful words, we were just as versed in communicating our grievances as we are our thanks, but with the same thoughtfulness and charity contained in our thanks? 

If I was as quick to sit down with the pen, paper scraps and glue to make an expression in response to something painful as I was with something generous, I imagine that kind of honesty and willingness to communicate might foster a love upon which deep relationships are built. It would seem, then, the  lopsidedness of communication that is so encouraged by etiquette--the keeping it light and positive--makes for shallow hearts.

A plea for Ugly Goblins and Formless Monsters.

Therefore let the Abbess show equal love to all
and impose the same discipline on all
according to their deserts.

Chapter 2 What kind of Person an Abbess Ought to Be

Today, on a whim, I saw a little brown pocket book on the shelf at Oxfam and picked it up. It was a print of an essay by John Ruskin called "The Political Economy of Art."

In the 19th century John Ruskin argued for the artist; more specifically, he argued for the importance of the artist to any society at any given time. It was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and he would correctly predict that a revolution built on precision, efficiency, and making money would quickly find no use for the artist's life: one built on perfection, uniqueness, and making things of beauty. 

I find his words prophetic given that we are in an age where art programs and music programs are the first to go from public schools because they are deemed to have no real value in comparison to science and math.

Res, non Verba.

"That is to say,
she should show them all that is good and holy
by her deeds even more than by her words..."

Chapter 2 What kind of Person the Abbess Ought to Be

It seems lately that I spend too much time in front of this glowing screen--reading, listening, and writing. It a 2-dimensional labor, this sort of work, one that is almost entirely built on words and physical inertia. I am a PhD student and words about stuff seem to be what I make more than anything. More than any woodwork or baked good or knitted thing, I make rhetoric and arguments and pleas for something as strange and irreducible as the Old Testament. That is what I study--that giant, and all its words.

There is a latin phrase which caught my eye a few years ago, res, non verba - "deeds, not words." Today I recall why it still resonates with me.  With all of the webs I create on-line, all of the pointed memes and one-liners and abbreviated information which are all inherent to communicating on social media, I realize now how half-empty it is of me to paint a picture of who I am and what I believe in this life through just those words.