Intersections 5

My first week of my new life and the reviews are mixed:

First official drive to seminary: a peaceful beginning to a day as it moved from pitch dark to sunrise over rolling hills and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony filled the car.

Spiritual direction class earlier in the week: average age maybe mid-50s. Almost everyone has adult children. Seminary class: average age about 24. Almost everyone is one of the adult children.

Lovely and engaging and truly kind and generous people in both places.

I have had enough orientation processes in the past week to last me both this lifetime and the next. I might never do anything new ever again.

Advance class registration by computer would be a GOOD thing.

(Skip this one if you like the song in question. Or just remember that I, too, have had people wrinkle their noses at my preferences.) That song posted on RGBP a couple of weeks ago? I was a bit mystified by the report that it is one of the top ten songs sung in American churches. I happened to hear it live for the first time this past week. I think I was probably the only one in the seminary chapel who was hearing it for the first time, given that everyone else seemed to know all the lyrics. I remain mystified by its quite evident popularity. (I did really like the band. But we could put that song to rest. In my extremely humble opinion.)

Funny addendum: in church at home this morning we sang Earth and All Stars, presumably in honor of Labor Day. As we reached the line about "loud boiling test tubes" I started to chuckle, remembering a rather passionate conversation earlier this summer when it became clear that about half of our members love that song and about half of us despise it. I'm actually neutral on that one.

I am now in possession of a Greek dictionary. Not something I had ever thought of owning until a few months ago!

So what about Gray's? My Jewish teaching colleagues and I discussed it obsessively every Friday morning last year; my women friends and I reviewed it every Saturday morning at breakfast. My daughter has had Gray's groups at both of her colleges. And there I was, watching it all by my lonesome in the dorm Thursday night.

I heard a great many stories over the two-day seminary ordination that began with the words, "I have known I was called to ministry since I was thirteen or fourteen years old." Hmmm. I'm thinking that perhaps I won't be relating what I was called to at thirteen and fourteen.

Kind of interesting: I knew more about what was going on in the world during my eight day silent retreat at the beginning of August, thanks to the prayers offered at mass every morning, than I did in for the two days of seminary orientation at the end of August which, despite myriad presentations and endless conversation (and numerous prayers), felt a bit cocoon-like. The President could have resigned and I'm not sure we would have known about it.

This past week I heard one of the most astounding pulpit voices I have ever encountered. That woman will be an astounding gift to a congregation next year.

I participated in nine masses and four Presby worship services in the the month of August. I discovered a new love for Roman Catholic liturgy and the primacy of the Eucharist therein. (Not so much the music though.)(It does seem that I have some music issues.) Of course, I am distressed every time I go to mass by the absence of women priests. I heard a couple of fabulous Protestant sermons and some lovely Catholic homilies (some of them by women -- but not, of course, by women priests).

I found Protestant spirituality in a Jesuit retreat center, and Ignatian spirituality in a Presbyterian seminary.

Welcome to my world. The one with the endless litany of contradictions that WILL NOT GO AWAY.

1:29 and 1:31 pm

My boys will be 23 years old in a few hours. There they are, three days after they were born, with their great-grandmother, whom they were privileged to know well and whose 100th birthday they were able to celebrate last year!

I know that one of them reads this blog so here, sweetie, are some of the details (gory ones excluded):

Twins are considered full term and ready to arrive at 38 weeks of pregnancy. You showed up two and one-half weeks later, with considerable impetus from a group of perturbed docs, at 6 pounds 14.5 ounces and 6 pounds 4 ounces.

It took you 18 hours to make your debut, finally via a c-section that I watched in a mirror. The sight was nothing short of spectacular.

Your personalities were apparent even in the OR. The photos show that one of you dozed off immediately, at peace with the world, and the other looked around frantically, already imagining the most dramatic possibilities. You each know which you are.

You are off on your own lives now, but I am thinking of you all day.

Happy Birthdays!

It's The Friday Five!

I haven't been around for the Friday Five for awhile, so it's nice to come back to the topic of my favorite season:

It's Labor Day weekend here in the United States, also known as Summer's Last Hurrah. So let's say goodbye to summer and hello to the autumn. (People in other climes, feel free to adapt as needed.)


1. Share a highlight from this summer. (If you please, don't just say "our vacation to the Canadian Rockies." Give us a little detail or image. Help us live vicariously through you!)

Sitting in the middle of the shallow rapids of the Speed River outside Guelph, Ontario, where I made my eight-day retreat at the beginning of August. Sun sparkling on water rippling over my legs, the only sounds coming from the water and the kingfishers and the occasional quacks of unsettled mallards.

2. Are you glad to see this summer end? Why or why not?

Yes and no. I'm going to miss the lazy days and I already miss the Lovely Daughter, who was home and hadn't been for a long time. But I'm ready to get started on the next part of my life.

3. Name one or two things you're looking forward to this fall.

Being here, at seminary, and being home, in my Ignatian spiritual direction program.

4. Do you have any special preparations or activities to mark the transition from one season to another? (Cleaning of house, putting away summer clothes, one last trip to the beach)

I should be so organized!

5. I'll know that fall is really here when . . . I am walkng through yellow and red and orange!

Intersections 4

I have moved a son into Gigantic State University, with students in bright red t-shirts pushing laundry carts piled with luggage up and down ramps and into elevators and down hallways that are bright and clean for at least one day.

I have moved a son into a teetering monstrosity of an old hotel-turned-into dorm at Windy City University, where a view of Lake Michigan makes all worthwhile.

I have moved a daughter into a dorm a week after freshman orientation ended and 2000 miles from where she expected to be and watched her rise to the challenge.

I have moved that daughter into a We-Survived-Katrina dorm and wandered a city and coast devastated and largely abandoned but showing signs of determination and the will to survive.

And now -- I have moved myself into a brand new seminary dorm which turns out to be the most luxurious of them all! I have my very own bathroom, something which in the 54 years of my life I have never once enjoyed, and I have AIR CONDITIONING.

It was pretty funny yesterday to see the other women my age helping young people move in as I was moving myself in. I think most of the -- ahem -- older students live in apartment style housing, but the dorm is less expensive, more convenient, and furnished. I saw people dragging mattresses out of vans yesterday -- no thank you! I have done my time in that regard.

I have just the tiniest feeling that I will be mining a good deal of humor from my new situation.

For now, I am back home for a day and a spiritual direction class, and then back to seminary for orientation tomorrow.

Funky Winkerbean's Lisa is Dying

I've become attached at the hip to Funky Winkerbeam, a comic strip at which I'd never even glanced until a friend of mine, a hospice chaplain, mentioned this summer that one of its major characters was dying of cancer and had elected to forego further treatment. Suddenly I became a fan of heroic Lisa the lawyer, who challenges cancer by living each day with vigor and determination, and her embattled little family, circle of loving friends, and newfound son, whom she had given up for adoption in an earlier life.

The comic strip's creator gave a recent series of interviews from which I learned that Lisa would indeed die this fall, probably in October. He has been beseiged by fans begging for a miraculous cure, but he long ago decided that Lisa's story would be one of the hard ones.

Several days ago, on my daughter's birthday, Lisa appeared before Congress to testify about cuts in funding designated for cancer research. "This," she said, "is a war we could actually win." She didn't have any hair, but she retained her eloquence and grace as an attorney and spokesperson for those who walk in her shoes.

But then, a couple of days ago, Lisa's husband, commenting on her energy in going to Washington and coming home to host their daughter's birthday party, discovers as he cleans up after the guests have left that she has fallen asleep on the couch. I wondered, had that renowned energy of Lisa's suddenly and finally deserted her?

It seemed so yesterday, when Lisa honored the promise she had made to her daughter to walk her to her first day of school; she hugged Summer good-bye and then, unable to rise from the sidewalk, told her husband that she would wait for him to get the car. Summer had already gone into the building, her memory of her first day forever unmarred thanks to the loving courage of her mother.

I remember one of my last significant conversations with my own mother. I was just a little older than Lisa's daughter. It must have been sometime in September; school had started, we were in the car, and she was telling me that there was a plan afoot for me to skip into third grade. What did I think about that, she wondered?

A terrible idea! I pointed out that cursive writing was taught in second grade; if I skipped ahead to third, I would be in a class in which everyone would know how to write in cursive ~ everyone but me. I would be the "stupid kid," the one who couldn't write.

Oh, said my mother, quite thoughtfully, at least in my recollection.

And then within the next few weeks, in early October, both she and my youngest brother were killed in an automobile accident as she drove me to second grade one day, and there was no more talk for awhile of anything beyond survival.

I can hardly bear to watch Lisa and her family, and yet I am mesmerized by the journey they are making together. They are only characters in a comic strip, and yet I am overcome by the desire to shield them from the October that will inevitably come.

Intersections 3

The plate is starting to fill.

I'm just back from the week-end retreat that marks the beginning of my training as a spiritual director. (Not silent, this one!) My class consists of nineteen people, sixteen women and three men, ranging in age from 42 to somewhere in the 70s. Mostly Roman Catholic but also Presbyterian, Lutheran, Southern Baptist, and Episcopalian. From all kinds of business and professional backgrounds, all having spent years in various forms of ministry, all having found their way to the spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola. We had a couple of presentations focusing on Ignatius's story and on an overview of the Spritual Exercises, some quiet alone time, prayer liturgies, a presentation on the nuts-and-bolts of the program, lots of informal conversation time, and Mass this morning with a commissioning of the class that has just finished its two years of training.

It was energizing and exciting to spend two days surrounded by such a diverse group of people, every one of them brimming with the joy found in the Ignatian experience.

And . . .

Before I left the house on Friday afternoon, I tried to clean up some of the accumulated paperwork piles inhabiting the kitchen and dining room and discovered a thin and unobstrusive envelope containing. . . drum roll . . . notification that I have been awarded a Study Grant (i.e., a scholarship) from the national church! So, to those of you who are members of PC(USA) congregations which contribute to our educational funding: THANK YOU!!!! I am delighted to receive both the funding and the vote of confidence it implies from a committee that, beyond my writing and recommendations, has no idea who I am. I am also glad that I did not discover the envelope until it had been here, apparently, a week (!), since it provided me with a needed sense of grounding and balance just as I was preparing to dive into one of my two fall programs.

And . . .

I slipped away from the retreat very early on Saturday morning for a dash to the airport to kiss the Lovely Daughter good-bye. As I hung out with Ignatius and friends, she texted me several times during the day:

Just arrived in Phoenix!

I'm in Portland and so are my bags!

I'm in my dorm room!

And . . .

my father, en route home from a Sierra Club adventure in Montana, spent the week-end in Chicago with one of our sons. He seems to have thoroughly enjoyed spending time with Son and Lovely Girlfriend in their adopted city.

I always feel somewhat unsettled by these weeks in which I am keeping track of family members as they move around the globe. I feel a little like a human GPS ~ and now I'm part of the movement, too!

Best Friends

Last night my women friends took me out for a send-off dinner. We drank margaritas and ate Mexican food and talked over the same things we've been talking over for twenty years: marriage , children, illness, death, REmarriage, children, schools, expectations -- and the new topic: someone is going to seminary.

At the end of the evening they gave me a photograph of the whole group of us on one of our hidewaway cabin week-ends (excepting me, who apparently missed that particular year). Ten middle-aged women laughing into the camera -- they all look as fabulous and funny and smart and loving as they are. We all laughed some more as we imagined of what my -- ahem -- younger -- seminary classmates would ask about this motley crew of women old enough to be their mothers.

"I'll tell them," I said, "that they should be so lucky."

Almost

Last day of work for The Lovely Daughter yesterday. Two of her friends just picked her up for their amusement park excursion. Looking at the sky, I leaned into the car window and said, "If it starts to pour, be sure and pull over!"

"My mom JUST called to say that!" said the driver. Much laughter ensued. I wondered how many times in the past fifteen years we moms have made statements identical to one another's.

"Have you girls given any thought to when you might come home?" No, of course not. But they will be two hours away. "Well, when does the park close?"

"8:00," said the other passenger. "So we'll be home before or after 8:00."

More laughter.

I don't suppose you would believe me if I told you just how smart these young women are.

*******

The Lovely Daughter leaves for college in Oregon on Saturday. One of the other girls would be headed that way as well except for the fact that this year it's France for her. The driver goes back to New Haven soon. The fourth of their little group is already in Singapore, where she arrived on her twentieth birthday a couple of weeks ago.

Last night our Session (church governing council) meeting ended with everyone around the room saying something to or for me as I head off to seminary. It was unexpected and lovely (as well as quite embarrassing), and I know I will treasure some of those words in the months ahead.

Lunch today with our senior pastor -- a final boost out the door. Sort of. I'm co-leading a class at church in a couple of weeks.

Meeting tomorrow for the first official time with my new spiritual director (yeah, I stuck with the Jesuits) and then a week-end retreat with all the people involved in my spiritual direction training program. I will slip out Saturday morning for a dash to the airport to kiss The Lovely Daughter good-bye.

Next week: the spiritual direction program beings and the seminary orientation takes place.

All these months (and years) of hoping and dreaming and planning are coming to the first stage of fruition. Pretty cool.

Changes

West Point Lighthouse *** PEI

*****

Sometimes when I have nothing to say, I look back at previous years' posts.

Today, if it were today in any of the past six years, I would be back for the teachers' orientation week at the Orthodox Jewish school in which I taught Social Studies. I would be wearing a long skirt, lugging AP textbooks from storage to classroom, and gossiping with colleagues.

Instead, I continued my efforts to purge our house of its twenty-three years of accumulated junk which includes, among other things, the English papers of a long-ago college student. As I looked at reams of typo-filled onionskin pages and the stream of comments that cover so many of them, I felt intense gratitude for the rigor of professors who were unencumbered by either grade inflation or a sense of duty toward the "self-esteem" of their students.

On the positive side, a freshman year paper on Richard II, with a B+(+) at the end and a lengthy comment beginning with the words, "A very good piece of work -- well-written, well-documented. (It is very refreshing to come upon a paper that actually shows some control of style.)"

More typical for some classes, a paper on William Blake for a junior year honors class, graded C+/B- with comments beginning as follows: "You must sharpen your language and avoid rhetorical evasions and redundancies."

I have decided to evade further paper sorting and look redundantly at photographs instead. Two years ago the Lovely Daughter and I had just returned from a graduation trip to Prince Edward Island, Katrina was in no one's lexicon, and college in Oregon instead of in NOLA was in no one's line of vision. How quickly things changed in a week!

Intersections 2

Five wooded acres with a creek running through them. More than an hour's drive from any major city. For sale.

My grandfather gave me that land as a wedding gift. His transparent hope: that my husband and I would build a house next door to his and my grandmother's and raise our children there. An unlikely scenario, given our two-career dilemma at the time and the fact that, while I occasionally entertained Atticus Finch fantasies, our connections to my tiny hometown were simply too tenuous for us to establish ourselves there. But my grandfather was an optimistic man.

He was also a completely secular man. I know of only three religious legends about him. And the first of them doesn't even really concern him but, rather, his mother. A WCTU matron, she apparently sallied forth from her home every Monday to visit the rectory and advise the Methodist minister on the ways in which his sermon of the previous morning might have been improved. I'm sure his enthusiasm upon seeing her must have been somewhat restrained.

The second story isn't really about my grandfather either. My grandmother had an uncle who was a Methodist bishop, "the most tedious man on the planet," according to my grandfather's description. He extended that tidbit of commentary one day by adding, "Marrying and burying ~ that's all they're good for."

The only story with any religious bent that directly portrays my grandfather himself came from a friend who is a nun. My family was in the grain business and the nuns, whose convent lies twenty minutes from town, have a farm, so my grandfather frequently spent time with them, discussing beans and corn and equipment and weather. As the decades passed, my grandparents and the sisters discovered mutual interests in music, art, politics, and nature, and became fast friends. The story in question probably comes from about 1970; my grandfather would have been about sixty-five years old and Sister A about forty. She told me some time ago that they were visiting together one afternoon and he mentioned that he would like to go into the sanctuary.

"So we did," she said. "And I genuflected, and moved into the pew, and knelt down to pray. Your grandfather followed me and sat down on the bench. After a few moments, he said, "You really believe in all this, don't you?"

Bemused, she responded, "Yes, H. I do."

"Sometimes," he said, "I wish I could."

Sister A was the first person I consulted about selling my land to help pay for seminary. Although there had never been the tiniest thread of obligation attached to the gift, I still felt uneasy. Certainly my grandfather's intention could not have been less related to the reality unfolding before me, and to sell under these circumstances and in this market is hardly a savvy economic move of which he would approve, regardless of purpose.

"Your grandfather," said Sister A, "would have wanted you to exercise complete freedom of choice in this situation, and he would be thrilled to have been able to help." And then her eyes began to dance and she began to chuckle. "If only he were alive so that I could see the look on his face at this turn of events!"

Last week-end I was down in the southern part of the state visiting family. I walked the creek , which at the moment is a dry bed of rocks, not a run in any way, shape, or form. I flipped over the fossilized remains of brachiopods and coral, hoping for a trilobite. (We have never found even one in that creekbed, although a massive trove of them lies on a remote farm a few miles away, but I am optimistic, too.) I listened to the chickadees and a distant catbird, and looked over the building site above the creek, a perfect foundation for a thatched-roof cottage designed for hobbits. I hope that someone who will love the land purchases it, but I have relinquished control over all potentialities in that regard.

And then I stopped by the convent to see Sister A, who greeted me with open arms and the words, "So here comes the future minister!"

Yes, my life is brimming with intersections. Devout Catholic nun friends colluding with a grandfather whose own deeply reflective life of the spirit precluded allegiance to organized religion. Land marked by the creatures of the Paleozoic, and by the descendants of the Puritans of the seventeenth century and the German immigrants of the nineteenth who married each other and farmed there for generations. Ancestral people and places whose message echoes down the creek and through the woods and across the fields: Go! We all made you who you are, but you cannot stay rooted to this land and be the woman whom you are called to be. Gather what we have offered you, put it to use, and go.

Five wooded acres with a creek that usually runs through them. For sale.

Happy 20th, Lovely Daughter!

I actually woke up at 2:01 this morning. Apparently an inner clock was set to mark the end of my life as a mother of teenagers.

She's working in a law firm and planning a celebration trip to an amusement park for later this week with her best childhood friends.

Today she's celebrating by taking me to the last day of an Ansel Adams exhibition.

By this time next week, she'll be back in Oregon. She's got a fall semester job planning events for Japanese students and a spring semester in Prague ahead of her.

Who could possibly have imagined what lay ahead for that little 6-pound-7-ounce bundle nestled up next to me twenty years' worth of mornings ago?

(The image enlarges quite nicely with a click, if I do say so myself. I think the child has reached adulthood quite nicely as well!)

Intersections 1

I have been trying to decide what to do about blogging for the upcoming year. I thought about creating a new blog dedicated to my seminary/spiritual direction training life but, as some of my readers know, I have tried to maintain separate blogs before and failed rather dramatically. Way too ADD. I thought about going somewhat public, but for a myriad of reasons that seems to be a Very Bad Idea. I thought about what I might want to blog about with respect to my new ventures, and realized that I feel no compulsion to address via blogging the current divisions, political and theological, in my church, at least not beyond those occasional references that emerge naturally through my own experiences.

I thought about not blogging at all. Time is, after all, about to become a bigger issue for me than it has been of late. I could go cold turkey.

As I was considering my options, a longtime occasional reader from the AOL days left me a lovely comment, to the effect that reading the blog can be like a retreat at times. Hmmm, I thought. Maybe that's the focus. I suppose I will continue to ramble through my daily life in my entries, reduced in number through they might be, which means that all of the subjects listed in my sidebar will continue to show up from time to time. But the religious stuff? Maybe more reflection and less minutiae? Or not? The spiritual does have a way of making its appearance through the trivial.

I guess we will have to see. What I have concluded for the time being is to try to set the more focused "new life" entries aside, however haphazardly they appear, into a series entitled Intersections, a word which reflects the locus of my life right now. There is a place about half a mile from our home where five streets come together in one massive intersection, necessitating five different crosswalks and a confusing computerized system of signals for cars and pedestrians. I am feeling a bit as if I am standing in the middle of the entire conglomeration of pavement, lights, cars, and people. Peacefully. And hopefully. (The gelateria is, after all, right there.)

So ~ Intersections it is.

The photo marking the series is from Iona.

Spiritual Direction: Today's Perspective

The participants on the retreat from which I returned last week came from as far west as Vancover, as far east as Nova Scotia, as far south as Virginia. Most of us looked pretty commonplace and, with the exception of a couple of large crosses dangling from necks, evinced no visible sign of a particular faith or approach thereto. The priests wore vestments when celebrating mass and were otherwise indistinguishable from the rest of us in their khakis and sandals and casual shirts.

So what is spiritual direction and why are all these people of ordinary appearance so committed to it?

The usual definitions of spiritual direction have to do with "helping you to notice God at work in your life" or "helping you with your prayer." It sounds simple enough, and probably unnecessary ~ until you start to think about the other things you do and the level at which you practice them.

The closest analogy for me would be photography. Just as most people pray in some capacity, most people with the technology available to them take photographs. Most of those images are snapshots of family, friends, and vacation scenery, and consist of a subject plopped into the middle of the lens and photographed at a manufacturer-determined and preset level of speed and lighting. The low level of expertise does not preclude the attachment of significant meaning to the photographs; in fact, that image of a slightly-out-of-focus and badly backlit Grandma laughing on the last beach vacation may have far more impact on her family than the professional portrait that sits on the piano. But no one would submit it to a gallery for its consideration.

At the other end of the spectrum are the pros. They know all about lenses and illumination, their houses and workrooms are littered with equipment, and some of them are even paid for their work. They see the world differently than the rest of us do ~ constantly framing, lighting, assessing. They spend hours researching the habits of their subjects, whether those subjects be antelopes or Presidents or the changing colors of the mountains. Their entire lives, interior and exterior, are formed by their passion for creating images as an expression of their lives and ours.

And then there are those of us in the middle. We know a little about the technology, but we have to ask the most basic of questions at each step on the way. We have been known to follow famous photographers down woodland trails, trying to see as they see and once in awhile rallying up the courage to ask them a question or two. As we learn, we do begin to see the world differently than we used to: we notice light and color, we watch where people (and other subjects) place themselves, we notice seemingly unrelated visual connections and relationships. We do not necessarily possess the skill to reflect what we see, at least not on any regular basis, but we do see more textures than we once did. And we are able to do that, most of us, not out of any intuitive brilliance or untutored skill. We are able to do it because other people have helped us learn.

I think that pretty much everything I've just written applies to spirituality as well as photography. (Go back and re-read it and see whether you agree.) And I think that a pretty good working definition for spirituality would be that it is the way in which we encounter God ~ which, in the parlance to which I am becoming accustomed, means prayer. And prayer means an attentiveness to God in all things, so that our listening and our doing and our being all have the potential to become our prayer.

With prayer, I am in the middle once again, just as I am as a photographer. I'm not sure how it happened, but at some long and gradual point in my life, the prayer I heard and repeated in church and in private became a springboard for questions about the Being to whom we were praying, and what exactly it was that we thought we were doing, and what the reverberations might be, and what other means of prayer we might want to explore, and who each of us is in relation to the God we seek or don't seek. And guess what? I needed help. Lots of it.

There is a long history of spiritual direction in the Christian church. A lot of people are surprised to discover the long history of spirituality itself in the Christian church (which is a little bizarre, when you think about it, given that spirituality is about encountering God and church is about ~ what? something else?). My director, who has just moved away, suggested that I read a little Thomas Merton book on direction as I looked for someone new, and I was intrigued to discover that the concept of spiritual drection in Christianity developed in the early centuries of the church among the desert fathers and mothers. It was presumed that the pastoral needs of the people in the churches would be attended to by their priests and bishops. However, once a few hardy souls moved away from the community, it became apparent that a life in solitude could send one off the deep end with surprising ease, and that assistance in staying on track was of benefit. It's not so different today, although a life of prayer in the deserts of northern Africa and the Mideast is for most of us replaced by a life of prayer in the spiritual desert of (post) modern life. The challenging of staying on track has not faded.

What happens in spiritual direction? You talk, a director (or guide, or companion, or whatever you want to call him or her) listens and occasionally nudges, and the Holy Spirit works. It's not therapy, although the mysterious process of human relationship upon which therapy is founded is also at work and, of course, the Big Issues of your life have a way of emerging. It's not devoted to unraveling your past or plotting your future, although both come up as they bear on your attempt to understand and respond to God's disclosure to you in the present. It can be really difficult and serious, and it can be really difficult and humorous. And sometimes it's actually easy.

Spiritual direction (much like a polished photograph) is ultimately about discernment and its consequences. We tend to think of discernment in prayer as a process for the big things in life: Should I marry this person? Go to law school or go to work for Pixar? Pursue social justice or a 401(k)? Turn my life upside down and go to seminary or retain my employment and secure salary? (Yes, go ahead and laugh.) But discernment is a means for seeing God in all things, not just the big ones, and engaging in the process of spiritual direction nurtures that capacity in us. If you are called into the desert of prayer, it's good to have company.

What Were You Doing Up There? (Retreat Part 4)

Some retreat clarification, in response to various questions people have asked me:

Yes, you talk to your director! Each day your director suggests a passage of Scripture for you to reflect on, and then the next day you talk it over with her or him. A few sentences can lead you on countless winding paths and even, sometimes, to a genuine inner stillness and alertness to the Spirit of God.

No, you don't have to do another single thing. One of my friends asked about the work of preparing meals together -- nope. The delicious meals were prepared and beautifully presented by the kitchen staff -- which also works in silence, so as not to disturb the retreatants in the dining room.

I thought longingly of my computer and its internet access maybe three times in eight days.

I found the silence easy and the eight days short. I'm sure one's mileage varies, and I wouldn't predict even my own future experience based upon this recent one. But I have a pretty well-established practice of lengthy daily silence for listening for God, which itself has an effect on the prayer going on inside my head or through my activities even when I am chattering away or otherwise engaged during the rest of the day. So, this time at least, the silence went well for me.

I'll try to write a little about spiritual direction tomorrow. It's been such a significant part of my life for the past two years that I tend to forget how weird the entire concept sounds. But yes, I am aware that when you use words like "spirituality" or "direction" in most of the contexts I inhabit, people start thinking New Age or Eastern tradition or medieval or rigidity of discipline.

For now let's just leave it at this: you will never have to worry about mistaking me for Mother Teresa.

Enjoy the sunrise!

Retreat (Part 3) Colors and Light

Stuart Gordon writes a fine blog entitled Colors and Light ; I highly recommend his work to you. And since that phrase occured to me many times as I wandered the retreat house grounds last week, I offer here my own version of Guelph color and light in grays and browns.

Today I also want to recommend the two Jesuit prayer sites I frequent:

Pray as You Go

and

Sacred Space.

Retreat (Part 2): Early Morning to Early Evening

I read one book, off and on, while I was on retreat: Walking in the Spirit: A Reflection on Jeronimo Nadal's Phrase "Contemplative Likewise in Action" by Joseph F. Conwell, S.J. It's a combination history of the early Jesuits, biography of Jerome Nadal (who, while not one of the earliest of the Society, was a significant member and prolific writer in the years immediately preceeding and following the death of Ignatius) and treatise on prayer. I copied several sections into my journal, including the following:

"To insist on a Trinitarian orientation to prayer does not set limits on prayer but gives it a field of play broader than all creation. At the same time, fully Trinitarian prayer plants one's feet squarely on the earth. If a [person] grasps a Trinity-pervaded universe, then that grasp generates not merely a vision, a wonderment, an overwhelming gasp at the beauty and grandeur of it all; it initiates an immensely practical surging forward to meet and tangle with a world in revolt against that beauty and grandeur and love. Love born out of love moves to love."

Does This Explain Anything?

Usually I come out as pretty balanced on the introvert/extrovert scale. In fact, people often seem surprised to discover that I have an ounce of introvert in me.

Do you think this is a function of an eight-day silent retreat?

(Oh, and the Geena? An oft-used internet ID of mine, left over from when a friend and I temporarily called ourselves Geena and Susan (as in Thelma and Louise). I was tired of always being the brunette academic, so I decided that, online at least, I could look like Geena Davis. Guess that's the dreamer/visionary me!)

Eight Days on Retreat (Part 1)

Loyola House occupies 600 acres of farmland and orchard in southern Ontario, and for eight days about forty of us kept almost complete silence there (yes! ~ eating in silence, walking in silence, swimming in silence), moving about as we wished except for the 45 minutes spent with a spiritual director each morning.

I settled into a routine almost immediately: walking the labyrinth for about an hour before or after breakfast; meeting with my director and going to the liturgy in the late morning; a very l-o-n-g walk most afternoons along the river that meanders far through the property, which provided almost complete solitude and opportunites to play out in the middle of sparkling shallow water; a before-dinner swim in the most welcome pool; an evening walk through fields or woods; and a late evening turn around the labyrinth again. The meals were beyond delicious; the chapel, dining room, and living room were all elegant in their simplicity and beautiful use of woodworking craftsmanship; the atmosphere was Jesuit and ecumenical; and the mosquitos were in abundance.

My retreat was a difficult one. I had read that sometimes retreats are full of light and ease, and sometimes they challenge and disturb. Now that I look at some of the images I brought back with me, I see both light and darkness in abundance. The Christian journey exactly.

Three New Things

Chicago Botanic Gardens

Sometimes the demarcations of life are anticipated ~ with enthusiasm, dread, indifference, or a combination thereof ~ but expected and anticipated nonetheless. Graduations. The first day at a new school or job. The birth of a child.

Sometimes they are visible only in hindsight. Terrible ruptures that break life into pre and post. Accidents that main or kill. Failures of nerve or integrity. Pearl Harbors and Nine-Elevens. Or . . . unexpected and to all appearances mundane encounters that lead to new creations, new unities, combining the paradoxical and fusing the disparate.

I'm not sure where this one began, but I'm going to put it into the category of unexpected new creations and count the next chapter from today, the Feast of St. Ignatius, and tomorrow, the first day of the month with Three New Things. Today looks pretty mundane from where I sit. My list has 18 things on it (not counting blogging!) : one important letter to write, but mostly things like laundry and vacuuming.

Tomorrow I'm off to the Loyola Retreat Center in Guelph, Ontario for an eight-day silent retreat. I've never been to Guelph. I don't have the foggiest idea who my director will be. I have two goals for the retreat, one having to do with where I find myself right now, and the other being to remain open to the unexpected. A week from now I will still be there in a geographical sense, but who knows where I will be otherwise?

In another couple of weeks, I will begin a two-year training program in spiritual direction, Ignatian style, which will bring me home for a class every couple of weeks. Another retreat, but that one full of conversation and new classmates getting to know one another. New people and new expectations, but both rooted in the spirituality of the man who died on this date 411 years ago.

And then a week later, off to seminary, in response to a call to which I finally responded with a clear sense of commitment and intention and joy and apprehension, all merging in a time of prayer in Paris last summer where the questions and tensions of the Reformation seemed utterly alive to me as I walked the streets where Ignatius and Calvin had walked at the same time (although, no doubt, never together!) Some days, the joy takes over. Some days, the fears. I suppose it was the same for them.

Well.

The laundry. And then, Three New Things.

More Life Is Good

We spent the evening having a picnic with friends whose own Lovely Daughter leaves for her junior year abroad later this week. Three of the four Montessori friends were there, each of them in the process of turning twenty this summer.

"We are SO PROUD of you girls," I told them. "How many people have said to me, "Your daughter goes to college in Oregon ? ~ but that's so far! And next year the three of you will be in Singapore, France, and Prague!" They are such wonderful girls: confident, articulate, and good-humored, but also gentle and unassuming. We are indeed all so proud of them.

And I have some more Chicago photos: The Young Adults (including Chicago Son's Girlfriend) in black and white, since The Lovely Daughter would no doubt notice the bruised sheen on her face left over from the Wisdom Teeth Escapade; a four-masted ship docked at Navy Pier; and more from the Stained Glass Museum: a Tiffany window portraying an angel guide, and a window from Chicago's Temple Emmanuel, c. 1908 or 1917.

Birthday Week-end (Click to Enlarge!)

Chicago Botanic Garden: Rose Garden and Carillon on Evening Island

Navy Pier: Ferris Wheel and Stained Glass Museum. The window is from the drum portion of the central lantern and dome of St. Paul's Univeralist Church in Chicago, designed in 1887 and destroyed in 1964.

Chicago Calls

Sunday's my birthday!

And we're spending the week-end in Chicago with ALL of our children!

Life is very good right at this moment.

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And....it's the Friday Five:

1. Have you experienced living through an extreme weather event- what was it and how did you cope?

Well, there was Katrina . . . I was the one at home while everyone else was stranded in Baton Rouge after unloading The Lovely Daughter's stuff at Tulane; I was the one yelling into the phone, "I know you can't see the weather channel, but I CAN!!! And it is very very very VERY big!"

2. How important is it that we wake up to issues such as global warming?

Pretty much.

3. The Christian message needs to include stewardship of the earths resources agree/ disagree?

100% agree.

And because it is summer- on a brighter note....

4. What is your favourite season and why?

October is my favorite season. There is nothing at all like October in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Or October anywhere else.

5. Describe your perfect vacation weather....

Crisp, clear, 65 F at night and 85 F during the day. The weather is not complete, of course, without the ocean.

But Lake Michigan will do!

Getting Here (IX): Ignatian Encounter

I wish that I could do justice to the experience of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. This is the first time I've tried to write about the process in any depth (other than in the voluminous journals I kept for myself), and I think some brief notes will have to do for now.

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Ignatius wrote the Exercises (1530s-1540s) out of his own experience of creating them as, recovering from a battle injury, he spent months contemplating the life of Christ. You can pick up a little paperback containing the Exercises just about anywhere, but it's not something I'd recommend. It's not of much use in the absence of guidance. (Of course, I ignored that advice when I got it. I knew that I was an intelligent and insightful reader, so I purchased a copy, took it home, and curled up to read. I lasted maybe, oh, five minutes, six max. The book is really written for the guidance of the one giving the Exercises, not the one doing them. It is, unless you have a helper, almost completely unintelligible.)

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The Exercises are divided into four "weeks" of contemplation. We might call them "sections" rather than weeks; they were never intended as chronological weeks. Week One addresses the creation of the universe and humankind and our subsequent fall from grace; the retreatant contemplates God's creativity and love and his or her own separation from same (otherwise known as "sin"). Week Two (usually about ten days in a Thirty Day Retreat) addresses the ministerial life of Christ and includes the famous discernment portion of the Exercises. Weeks Three and Four are shorter; their themes are the Passion and Crucifixion, and the Resurrection.

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I'm sure that there are countless ways in which to present and experience the Exercises. My director (who doesn't much care for that word) does so with great fluidity. The booklet I used, a gentle and contemporary guide, offers reflections and questions and several Scriptural passages for contemplation each "day." (I think it contains about 30 "days," which took me most of a real-time year.) Some weeks (real life weeks), I would be almost comprehensive in my coverage of the material. Some weeks I would spend all my time ~ hours of it ~ on a few sentences. Sometimes my director (for want of better shorthand) would ask if I had read this or that novel, or play, or poem, and suggest that I give some time to that alternative.

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The Exercises presume a variety of prayer forms. "Contemplation" in Ignatian-ese means an imaginative form of prayer, not the self-emptying sort of prayer so often implied in the use of the term. Ignatian contemplation involves imagining yourself into a scene or event or conversation in the Bible, or imagining one of them into your own life. It's an extraordinarily powerful way of experiencing God, Christ, the Holy Spirit ~ especially when you practice it day after day after day.

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The weekly or so conversation with a director is an integral part of the Exercises. It is often said that the "real director" of the Exercises is the Holy Spirit ~ but you do need a regular human being to help with the work. For me ~ a person always caught in the tension between individuality and community ~ it was nothing short of spectacular to receive the gift of another person's calm, kind, and thoughtful consideration of what I had to say about my life of prayer as it became entangled with everything that was going on in my most ordinary of daily lives. As I look back now, I find myself extremely moved by the very existence of the Exercises, created as an offering within the community of the church but passed on from one individual to another over a period of four and one-half centuries. I am particularly touched that in my case the "passing on" was from a seventy-something Jesuit priest to a fifty-something Protestant woman. The Holy Spirit does create the most miraculous possibilities.

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Some people use the Exercises primarily to learn to pray: to listen and be in relationship with God. Some, to make a major decision. Some, to find a way to follow Christ more closely in the lives they are already leading (also a major decision!). The advantage of pursuing all of those objectives in the form of a 19th Annotation retreat is that your movement in and out of your daily life (as opposed to a 30-day withdrawal to a retreat center) enables you to bring almost anything and everything, just as it is happening, to the table of prayer and discussion.

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Everyone's retreat is his or her own. In some ways, the course is probably fairly predictable. There is a certain pattern. Many of us may think that we want to demonstrate some kind of brilliant and unique spirituality, but in reality, the growth of a spirituality is like any other kind of growth, and what we really want is for it to follow a healthy pattern ~ just as we want to see our children grow from healthy infants into healthy toddlers and so on. Of course, as with anything else, sometimes dramatic differences emerge. But for most of us, our retreat is unique within some fairly typical parameters.

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I found that my retreat, in retrospect, seemed to fall into three sort of "chapters." At first, I experienced a great deal of resistance. I didn't give up, but I think that I had a very strong sense of self-preservation which was being challenged, and it was quite difficult to abandon my sense of control and fall into the process. Then I began to sense strongly that Christ was walking around in my life. I can't claim to have found comfort in that. I was . . . alert, observant, curious, challenged ~ but not comfortable. And then, finally, I began to feel that I was walking around in his. The world, and all of us in it, took on a different appearance to me.

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I said to someone a few weeks ago that the Exercises do not change who you are; they make you more of who you are. When I first came into the church, I was captivated by the sermons I've mentioned in an earlier entry on the topic of "What would Jesus do?" By the time I had finished my retreat (if, that is, one ever really finishes), I had a different question. We are not Jesus, and so the real question becomes: what would Jesus have you do? You may see anew, with eyes that have been changed by Christ, but it is still you doing the seeing and you who must respond. How would you live your life, the exact one given to the unique person you are?

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Doing the Exercises, excavating your spiritual self and developing a depth of aquaintance with Jesus Christ, is serious business. There are frustrations and tears and sometimes there is terrible sadness. But there is also a great deal of laughter and tremendous joy in finding that you really are created and called to be exactly who you are, and that in who you are you do have much to share and a role to play in Christ's continual gift of recreation.

Who We Can Be

Kindness
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

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You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of him who gives and kindles joy in the face of him who receives. All condemnation is from the devil. Never condemn each other. We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves.

~ St. Seraphim of Sarov

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I came across the second quote some weeks ago. I hesitated to post it because I fall so short. And the the poem appeared on Cynthia's blog this morning. I decided to go with them both. To read and savor and remember them both. Falling short is merely human.

Getting Here (VIII): The Jesuits Step In

It was all an accident.

I had been working on a master's degree at the local Jesuit university forever. One course at a time. I really wanted to pursue a Religious Studies degree, but what was I going to do with it? And I was by that time a teacher of high school English and Social Studies who had to justify some of her graduate work to a school committee, so I went with Humanities. In reality, a stealth Religious Studies program. A course on the Middle Ages? I wrote about the medieval church. A course on Michaelangelo? I researched the dome of St. Paul's. History? I explored Islam. You get the idea.

Early on in my program I needed a course, and there was nothing I wanted to take that semester, except possibly one called something like Spirituality and Narrative, which did sound right up my alley, could be justified on the grounds that the syllabus included Shakespeare and Faulkner and Jewish lore (Ha! I was teaching in a Jewish day school), and had a professor who was described to me by a department secretary as "new, but supposed to be good."

Yeah. Like, rock star good. So I took his next course, too, which was called Spirituality and Autobiography, and focused on Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton and Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, all via Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own. I had some difficult stuff going on, and so I read every word of every book and poured hours of effort into my papers. A way out and back into the light.

And then, having exhausted my need to satisfy The Powers That Be, I took the same professor's course on the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius and, a few weeks into that, asked if he would guide me throught the Exercises themselves, to which the answer was a surprising, "Sure." It's a huge committment and he's got plenty more of them to his Jesuit community, many of which take him out of town and around the world. But he said, "Sure."

I don't know what I thought I was doing. At that point, I had some idea of the Exercises, and some idea that Jesuits led disciplined lives of prayer and service, and I thought that I could turn into that kind of person. I thought I would turn into a person with an organized spiritual life. I thought, rather vaguely, that I would address that lurking sense of a call to ministry, because the Exercises are often used as a tool for discernment ~ but I wasn't too concerned about that, because I was confident that God would never call me into ministry. And it certainly did not occur to me that I would grow into any kind of experience with God, because I knew that I was destined for a life of faith within the limited confines of intellect and reason. In other words, I was completely delusional about my capacity for organization, God's capacity for irony, and my capacity for growth. As good a place as any to begin, I suppose.

I really had no idea what I was doing.

Here's how I described the Exercises in April of 2006, by which time eight months had passed and I had decided to start the process that would take me to seminary:

"St. Ignatius developed the Exercises in the mid-1500s as an imaginative process for exploring the life of Christ and encountering God. His basic idea was that individuals would engage in an intense 30-day retreat, following and praying over a specified range of readings and contemplations, and meeting daily with a spiritual director to discuss the internal journey that inevitably happens.

Thankfully for most of us, Ignatius was nothing if not practical, and in the context of a series of Annotations at the end of the Exercises, the 19th one to be precise, he mentions that some people might do the Exercises in the context of their daily lives, spending time each day in prayer and meeting with a director periodically. As a result, today there are 3-day retreats (more of a sampling, I think), 8-day retreats, 10-day retreats, 30-day retreats, and 19th Annotation retreats, the latter consisting of the orginal 30-day retreat spread across whatever time period it takes. A 19th Annotation retreat has the potential, as far as I can tell, to run on past eternity for those of us with busy lives and more of a mosying style of moving through the spiritual layers thereof.

I got started on my retreat in October and am finding it to be one of the most astonishing experiences I've ever had. I meet almost weekly with a Jesuit priest, in the midst of a life that includes teaching in an Orthodox Jewish school and active participation as an elder in the Presbyterian Church. I read the Bible, I read the Exercises, I read a lot of questions, I read novels and plays and poetry, and I rummage through Christ's life and my own. It's about as complicated and surprising and all-encompassing as it sounds."

I would describe the experience a little differently today. It would take a book! But maybe just a little more in another entry.

Summer Sunday Morning 10-11

A few minutes late to church. We are discussing The Budget at home. One of my husband's amazingly generous contributions to The Seminary Adventure has been to spend hours and hours and more hours over the past week completely reorganizing our finances so that we can send me to seminary, send The Lovely Daughter to her last two years of college including her semester in Prague, repair the gutters and the plumbing, and probably not go bankrupt in the process. His attention to detail and willingness to put the time in are astounding gifts to all of us. (I will spend hours trying to come up with exactly the right phrase for a sermon or presentation, but when it comes to the spreadsheets, I am more likely to wave off with a vague, "Close enough.") I am extremely grateful that his skills and inclinations and willingness are so different from my own.

The music this morning is a sequence of piano, classical guitar, and organ. Our music director is off to an event next week-end where a work of hers for 100 guitars and maracas is being premiered. Pretty cool. Our liturgist is a friend of mine who, like me, is an nth-career seminary student. Our preacher is another in our Summer Lay Preacher series and he does a wonderful job in his deep and elegant voice, interweaving Psalm 121 and the Mary and Martha story to produce a reflection on God's call to each of us to be the person we are. He begins with what seems like a lengthy reading in what turns out to be his native Nigerian language of Yoruba -- it's Psalm 121, which we have just heard in English. Quite beautiful in the Yoruban tongue. "I will look to the hills," he repeats in English, and I think about standing on the tops of very small mountains in the Adirondacks and the Blue Ridge, and horseback riding to the tops of higher moutains in the Rockies, and looking at the tops of very high mountains in the Tetons and the Alps, and about the Sky Islands that I heard about on Morning Edition yesterday.

Conversations after church: the lingering effects of the trip on the stomachs of some of the Nicaraguan travelers, family illnesses, advice on hair coloring (I am something of a beauty klutz ~ no, make that a total and complete incompetent in certain critical areas of midlife), career changes, summer travel plans, a new college graduate about to move to Nicaragua to work with an NGO there, college preparations for other young people, concerns about the impending youth trip to Nicaragua (which seems to have become our church's sister locale).

It's another beautiful summer day and I drive home, listening to the second movement of Tschaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. It's so nice to have made the transition from the first movement of Vivaldi's Winter, the discernment music to which I listened over and over again last March, to the lush peacefulness of the music that matches my present frame of mind.