Thomas Merton Hermitage, Day 5

Last morning here. What a rich experience this has been. Not the retreat envisioned, but . . . that’s life and part of God’s gift.

Barbara’s usually the quiet one. I’m more effusive. But in this time of life her spirits seem to follow the arc of the sun—lower in the winter, brighter (much brighter!) in the summer, and as it happened we came to the Hermitages the day after summer solstice. Silence has not been as much of the experience as expected.

Is that disappointing? A little. Maybe like a novice anchorite whose east wall has a big hole. Seems a little silly to complain about the sun.

Instruction for Centering Prayer or mindfulness meditation usually gets around to the concept of emptiness as a place we ultimately discover in prayer and contemplation. Over time I’m coming to want to name the experience fullness rather than emptiness, though I think it’s basically part of the unity (like winter and summer solstice?). Both emptiness and fullness describe openness to More. More room for anything—for our bright or dark selves, for other selves, for the big ol’ kingdom of God.

We leave in few hours and will go to Boone to visit, one last time, Barbara’s grandmother’s house, which will be torn down one day soon. Barbara used to come here every other summer from El Paso as a child—a magical journey from the brown hot desert to the cool green mountains.

The windows are boarded up now and we’ll stop to buy a flashlight in order find our way from room to room, from downstairs to up and back. And Barbara will say goodbye.

And then we drive to Albemarle to a wedding. Room. Enough Room. Gracious God in you we find room. Amen.

Thomas Merton Hermitage, Day 4

The past two nights we’ve closed our day in St. Anthony’s Chapel with the charisms of sacred space, light, silence, and music. We go in around 9:30, light four candles, read an opening prayer, listen to 20 minutes of music, close with a single prayer, blow out the candles and walk back to Thomas Merton under the stars.

Wednesday night we heard the first five pieces of Rachmaninov’s Vespers; last night we heard the first 5 songs from the album Music for Compline—a collection of Byrd and Tallis chanted by the group Stile Antico.

Gawd, what glory. Both these works share the virtue of being relatively simple, gorgeous, and conceived and performed by singularly talented people. Beauty is surely a means of grace. And bringing to the hearing a contemplative mind and heart amplifies the experience as much as a sound system.

Worship surely doesn’t need always to be so charged with felt grace, but it sure is energizing when it is.

God of realms, thank you, thank you, thank you for all ways we encounter you. Amen.

Thomas Merton Hermitage, Day 3

St. Anthony's Chapel

At 21 on and a trip to England, attending Evensong at York Minster turned out to be a pearl of great price in my spiritual journey. What impulse had driven the construction of such a building, I wondered? What longing had inspired such music—its composition and its singing? What force had sustained the keeping of both building and liturgy for 8 centuries? Maybe, from my point of view that night, it was the God beyond the image of the God I had stopped trusting.

Kneeling (a 21 year old skeptic kneeling!) and hearing that stunningly gorgeous music, hearing those near perfect voices and trying to connect them to those impossibly young faces filled my heart and mind with yearning and sadness and joy and a suddenly vast sense of sacred possibility.

I still sense untapped possibility when I hear simple, achingly beautiful music. And lately I’ve been wondering if we can’t experience something very like it in our local most assuredly non-cathedral spaces. I’ve been collecting recordings of chant (and what a lot of it there is) and listening, discerning, wondering how to be with it in morning, noon or night prayer.

What a gift to be at the Hermitages—what a wonderfully designed chapel for prayer and listening. Barbara and I have been experimenting with a mix of spoken prayer, silence, and recorded music in the morning, at noon and just before bed.

There’s obviously something ‘mechanical’ about plugging in a sound system and docking an iPod to it. And yet sitting in the chapel while experiencing simple sacred music is wholly glorious. This music endures because it opens us to God. It’s a joy to hear (a joy to sing too, but that’s another matter). To paraphrase Urban Holmes, music like this has the ability to bring our souls relatively unencumbered to a place where we encounter God.

Attention deepens what it regards. And realizing there’s something regarding us on the other side is powerful stuff.

God of left brain right brain whole body every body, give us wisdom to hear you and to know you. Amen.

Thomas Merton Hermitage, Day 2

One of the great spiritual hopes is that our spirituality will actually transform us. For four years now I’ve been doing insight meditation each morning and one of the promises this practice makes is that it will ‘train’ us to be present in the world in a richer way.

Barbara and I hiked yesterday afternoon. I had spent time last week planning a couple of hikes for us to take—this one, Roan High Knob in Tennessee, was the one I wanted to do most. High country (6,000 ft), grassy balds, long views, thousands of rhododendrons in bloom

The rhododendrons were certainly gorgeous, but the trail took us only through spruce and fir forest. Rich, ferny, mossy and moist. Lovely but close like a tunnel. None of the long, open, and longed for views. Some of the trail was actually asphalted. At one point a road bisected it, and a Dodge van was parked nearby with its engine and AC running for the benefit of the person inside. The temperature outside was in the 60s (the van was still running when we came back an hour later).

I also was stewing. The weight of disappointment was compressing my spirits. This was not what I had imagined, what I wanted, what I needed.

Still, in the spirit of ‘Presence’ I turned my attention back to the path as it was, breathing more consciously, smiling, and moving my feet forward on the alpine asphalt trail. For a minute and a half.

I still couldn’t believe our rotten luck. This was NOT how it was supposed to be. So I smiled and breathed and leaned into the moment again. And again in a moment was looping between regret and complaint, frustration and resentment. Remembering Jesus’ comment about a certain entrenched demon: ‘This one only comes out by fasting,’ which I took to mean ‘not without a lot of work,’ I said, Okay.

I’ll work. I’ll be honest about what I’m thinking and how I’m feeling. And I’ll be kind in the process.

There is a lot of ‘I’ in an account like this. There was a lot of ‘I’ in the frustration and disappointment impinging on an otherwise glorious hike. That was the sticky place and the arena for a good piece of work, gently plodding work with its rather proletarian ‘notice, welcome, let be, and be with’ over and over. It was also inspiring.

Continuing this simple cycle opened up that compressed and tight sense of self (at one point I also saw that I had somehow been able to blame Barbara for our bad luck because she had been impatient to park in the first parking lot we saw—as if that had anything to do with our having a wooded instead of an open hike).

All this stewing, however, gradually—and thoroughly—dropped away. Not repressed or glossed over but observed and heard. I did mostly miss half the hike by focusing inward. But only half. The return trip was stunning.

God of moist forest path and open grassy balds, I am profoundly grateful that ‘close’ or ‘open’ all paths are in you. Amen.

Thomas Merton Hermitage, Day 1

Barbara with her novel

A lot of expectations for one week. Major inspiration. Deep rest. Some sense of how best to begin a Christian mindfulness blog. Discovering the best pace for silence, speech, walking, sitting, eating, rocking on the porch, playing around with recorded chant as part of morning, noon, and night prayer.

Bless the sun for waking me up at six. The little cluster of hermitages at Valle Crucis is anchored by it’s svelte chapel, St. Anthony’s, facing east like tradition invites. What a gift to stroll outside to see this little speck of the world coming to light. Two or three birds sing. A windchime answers. Trees near our hermitage porch sway as the morning begins to breathe.

When good strong tea is brewed it is also a gift to sit down to read of the other kind of awakening, “Although the experience is special, it does not happen to a special person. It happens to any of us when the conditions of letting go and opening the heart are present, when we can sense the world in a radically new way” (Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry).

Gracious God, a season of busy-ness has stretched us thin, a vision of a quiet mountain retreat has enticed us, a good night’s sleep has refreshed us. The day awaits. We are here. You are here. Amen.

Serendipity