A Little Fire

I’ve been teaching and writing about prayer and the spiritual life for about five years now. It’s such a short time really. And as it goes on, I realize more and more that I know very little about prayer, God, or the spiritual life.

Just before Holy Week, I had the great pleasure of joining Martin Smith’s Compassiontide retreat. In the presence of this mature, authentic teacher, I could see my own immaturity even more clearly. I don’t say all this to put myself down, or to compare myself unfavorably, at 35, to a man who has been praying, writing, teaching, and living the Christian life for a long time. I say it because it’s true. Moreover, it’s a truth I find immensely comforting and hopeful, short-circuiting, as it does, my spiritual ambition, greed, and self-importance.

Continue reading “I’ll just have a rest”

Here we are, in Easter. The whole creation does seem to agree. It’s spring. The magnolia out back of the monastic enclosure is in full, glorious bloom. The daffodils lining the drive have opened their throats to the sky. It’s finally warm enough to sleep with the windows open, letting in the cool air and the birdsong.

Continue reading “the one thing necessary”

We put my father’s ashes in the columbarium two days before my 35^th birthday.

Dad would have laughed to see a small crowd of monks gathered around, saying prayers for him, commending his remains to their final rest until the Last Great Day.

I don’t know that he even believed in a Last Great Day. Like any Irish boy from Bayonne, he’d been raised Catholic. It didn’t stick. He was your typical free spirit—untethered and unmoored. He never went in much for obligation, never wanted to be tied down.

A week before he died, I got a text from his sister telling me he was fading. I was in Ireland, having led a knitting retreat for 20 women from all over the world. My dad was in Portland, dying of metastatic cancer so diffuse within him by the time they caught it that they couldn’t figure out where it started. Judy never called or texted. I knew it was important, so I called immediately.

My dad’s voice was breathy and heavy.

“Son, do you think Jesus forgives me?”

Continue reading “fatherlove”

This last week was a challenge. Walking with a friend, I tried to explain away the difficulty of the week in terms of my schedule. It’s true that my days were more fully booked than I’m now used to or prefer. But the week’s challenge really arose from the traffic between my ears.

It was one of those weeks where my habitual faultlines began to show on the surface. I kept getting caught up in my own inner patterns. I could see it all as it was happening, but I couldn’t manage to escape the tentacles of my mental and spiritual habits. Even my sleep became a challenge, so that at the end of days spent wrestling with myself, I couldn’t get the rest I really needed.

Continue reading “give me Jesus”

After reading a draft of my memoir a few weeks ago, one of my brothers asked if I intended to publish it. My first response was an immediate “of course!” What’s the point of writing if no one is going to see it? I set my quick response aside, though, and decided to take his question seriously.

I initially wrote this book three years ago. I couldn’t manage to finish it, so I set it aside. I only came back to it a few months ago, because I felt God calling me to do so. I’ve finished this second draft as a matter of faithfulness. If I’m to continue it that way, then I have to be honest that, though God may have called me to write it, I’m not at all clear that God is calling me to publish it. Hence taking seriously my brother’s question.

Continue reading “hidden with Christ in God”

I have just finished writing a book. To be more accurate, I have finished a rough draft of a book. It’s a spiritual memoir that traces the the thread of early losses, the way they hollowed me, and the way God entered my hollowness and pulled me into monastic life.

I’ve now written this book twice. The first time I wrote it as a therapeutic experience. I needed to see the loss, to feel its contours, to know that it was real. Then my father died. During his last year, my heart opened to him wider than I thought possible. The need to judge him disappeared, and I found I had, without my even knowing it, learned to love. I wrote the book the second time to tell that story.

Continue reading “a little life”

The wind is howling outside my window, and I’ve been dreaming of death again. For over a week now, every night, I struggle against the current. The undertow pulls at my ankles. The water fills my throat. The sky is black with a faint green tinge, the way it used to look when I was a kid and the tornadoes were rushing in. We’d huddle in the stairwell, in case the windows shattered.

I forget that this is what spring looks like every year. I can’t get down to the River because the snow still blocks the way. As it does on all my favorite nearby trails. It’s worse than snow. With the melting underway, it’s a crust of brittle ice over slush and mud. There’s an invitation to a bruised hip. I’m stuck on paved roads. The daffodils still seem too far away. And my hands are craving the dirt in a way they haven’t in years, since the garden was fresh, and I couldn’t keep myself away from it.

Continue reading “there is not enough time to shrink back”

I live in a cell bricked with books. Thousands of them, cemented with desiccated flowers I grew myself, sweat riming their papery remains. Glossed with calories burned and the tear of muscle. Wooly bits of yarn stick out from the cracks between the pages. Quilts blanket the ceiling, blocking out the stars. Outside, the myriad me stands sentinel. Altar boy, prep school scholarship star, Mardi Gras king, all in a row. It certainly is beautiful, as far as prisons go. For someone else it might even be a castle.

This is what idolatry looks like. These walls I built myself–these are my golden calf. Good and beautiful things, holy even. Ambition and moxie and nerve, all used to brick in a life, to create a simulacrum of safety. To keep things small and manageable.

Continue reading “cell by cell”