These days I often sit outside at night to pray.  The back yard is cloistered by summer's greenery, and should there be a full moon, it will be perfectly framed between the enormous cypress and my neighbor's unimaginably tall apple tree.  The view is lovely, but it's the soundscape that I find most attractive.  Though I live more than a mile and a half (as the bird flies) from a major highway, at night I can hear the traffic rush by, like a river just at the edge of my awareness.  The sound of the wind rustling through the tall trees far above my head always makes me think of the Spirit, ever stirring the pot, even when I can't otherwise feel or see her movements.

This morning at Mass, in the silence after the homily, I realized that behind me I could hear a once familiar sound in my life:  tiny cars being pushed along a wood surface.  The young gentleman was being (for such a young gentleman, he might have been all of two) very quiet, but in this acoustically lively space, still audible.  This, I realized, was the sound of the Spirit, rushing in to build up the Church.

I could hear, too, the off the cuff comments of the man who still faithfully comes to Mass with his wife, despite his progressing dementia.   He is not a fan of the silence, grumbling today, "Why doesn't the lector just get on with it!" and can't remember the words to the new translation.  Fr. Dennis' chanted "The Lord be with you," garners a firmly spoken "And also with you." He is a sign of the ways in which this moment is firmly anchored into all those other celebration of the Eucharist, all the way back to the first.  He may not get the silence, but Peter didn't get the washing of the feet, either.   This translation, that translation; we are still Church and the Lord is with us, as it was in the beginning, is now and forever will be.  This is the sound of the Spirit, praying in us when we can no longer find will or words.

The Spirit gives us ears to hear what those we might prefer stayed home to "watch the Mass on TV" or were in the cry room have to say to us.  We are all Church, we are all living stones, we require each other.

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For another take on the how to hear Pentecost, read Fran's thought provoking reflection at There Will Be Bread: I believe in the Holy Spirit...and other annoyances.

Crash has a week of down time between the end of his finals and the start of WJU's¹ summer presession (which is followed by the regular summer session).  Starting next Monday, he is taking Ancient Greek, putting the polish on the equivalent of two years of Greek.  After spending all day, every day for three weeks in Greek class, I expect to pick him up speaking fluent (ancient) Greek.  Or at least reading it.  In the meantime, he is reflecting about his freshman year on his blog (like mother, like son — except that he can write poetry and fiction.)

Even though it has been many years since I finished my first year in college (36 to be precise) his latest post on the utility of doorstops has me thinking about the doors (metaphorical and literal) that I make an effort to keep open, those that have been blown shut by an errant breeze and I haven't bothered to reopen — and those that I've jammed shut and painted over.

My orationis angulus was made by pulling the doors off a large awkwardly shaped closet in my study.  Crash holds the door open to let new people and experiences drift into his life.  So what was I saying when I created this space for prayer, with no doors at all? There are no boundaries. Can I bring this utter openness to my prayer?  Does it enable the prayer to pour back into my life?

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Photo is of doors to chapel at the old Jesuit novitiate in Wernersville.  Note the doorstop!

1. WJU = Wonderful Jesuit University

The drawings in the photo are by Osamu Nakamura, an artist who lives a simple heremetic life in the mountains of Japan.  The contemplative traditions course I taught a couple of years ago spent two days visiting with Nakamura-san, getting a sense for how this sort of life looked on a daily basis — and enjoying a chance to do some art ourselves in a place that was steeped in solitude and silence.

I had visited Nakamura-san's aerie a few months earlier, and shared the photos with a friend who is a stained glass artist, who then created a beautiful piece of stained glass that we gave to Nakamura when we returned.

Wayne designed the piece while on retreat at Wernersville's Jesuit Center, which had more than one connection to the class.  Much of Wayne's work embeds shards of the prayerful silence, as he reflects in a post earlier this week.

When I made the Exercises at Eastern Point, at the start of the retreat a box showed up, containing a note from Wayne (who had recently completed the Exercises) and a jewel-toned star.  It hung in my window throughout the 30-day retreat, a potent reminder of the beauty that comes from letting the Light shine through you, rather than bounce back.  And a reminder that many others had walked these paths before us, and were praying for all of us there.

Loyola Press is launching Arts and Faith this week, celebrating the myriads of ways artists wordlessly dance with God, collaborating in acts of beauty.  Like Wayne's stained glass, through which God and light both stream through, we are each works of art, collaborations between ourselves and God.  Go take a look, and see if you can find God streaming through the people and the beautiful things they create at Arts & Faith.

Yes, yes I know it's Mother's Dayin the Hallmark ordo (CSS has its limits, please imagine the hearts and butterflies and glitter). Math Man wished me a happy Mother's Day when I woke up this morning. "Should I make you breakfast?" "Truly, I just want a cup of tea and a cinnamon roll." (Note that this does not constitute breakfast in Math Man's book!)  There is a pause. "Does that mean just put the water on to boil for you?"  Absolutely, that would feel like amazing pampering in my book.


I came down to find the kettle just whistling and a cinnamon bun (its plump contours peeping over the top of the soup bowl in which it had been plopped — the plates were all in the dishwasher) and the mug that makes me laugh laid out on the counter.

The chore awaiting me today, though, is not anything anyone can help me with.  I have a dozen senior papers to read and a stack of general chemistry exams to grade.  Senior grades are due tomorrow morning (in my department by 9 am).  Math Man is already sprawled on the sofa doing the same thing, while The Boy (still recuperating from Friday's prom) is gearing up to study for Monday's AP Physics exam.  Here it's all about exams and grades and papers, mothers (and the 7th Sunday of Easter, for that matter) are on the back burner.  May I wish you a "Happy Grading Day"?

Like my mother or Mary DeTurris Poust, an official Mother's Day is not a need in my book. What I treasure are all the daily reminders of the ways in which I am webbed into a warm and loving community: Crash who sends me his final essay (on prostitution in London in the 18th century?); the ephemera in my breviary, holy cards for friends' mothers — and their children; postcards from friends clipped to the board in my offices at home and work; an origami love note from The Boy, left on my keyboard one afternoon years ago — still on my desk; the flowers Math Man brings home when he does the grocery shopping; the funny notes students have been leaving on the white board on my door...

"...that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them."

As I scrolled through my Facebook feed earlier this evening, I came across this icon posted by a friend — without seeing the punchline at the bottom.  I laughed out loud.

It made me think of last year, where I missed the celebration of the Ascension entirely.  On Ascension Thursday, I was on retreat at a monastery in a diocese where the Solemnity is transferred to Sunday, replacing the Seventh Sunday of Easter.  (Something that took me longer than it should have to work out at a 5:15 am celebration of the Office of Readings.)  On Sunday, I was in a diocese that celebrated Ascension Thursday on Ascension Thursday.  Jesus was staying for the summer it seemed?

It was awkward, it left me feeling off kilter all the way to Pentecost.  Praying the Liturgy of the Hours keeps me tuned in to the ebb and flow of the liturgical year on a more than daily basis, and when the external liturgical cues skip a beat, I notice.

The last time I missed Mass for Ascension, I was confined at home recovering from the birth of Crash.  I was hungry for the Eucharistic liturgy, as other than one outing for the funeral of my spiritual director, who had died suddenly, I had not been to Mass for two months, confined to bed with a complicated pregnancy.  That whole experience was rather like breathing through a reed underwater, the Hours dance round the Eucharist, but they do not replace it.  Today's first psalm at Lauds reminded me of that experience:  My body pines for you, like a dry, weary land without water.  Maybe that was a time when I wanted God like air.

Signs I might be getting older:

1.  Last night I was excited to find Oliver Sacks had tweeted about my article in Slate.  Math Man wasn't home, but I told The Boy who looked at me blankly for a moment, and said, "Who is Oliver Sacks?" (I prompted "Uncle Tungsten?" which provoked a mild grunt of recognition.) Today I chatted with Crash, who said once he had looked up Oliver Sacks he could see why I was excited.

2.  A student in my office today who wondered why I needed to swap glasses to read what she wanted to show me.

3.  My doctor, who when I asked about a symptom at an appointment this morning told me, with a matter of fact air, "You're aging."  To which I actually responded with a moan.

The last day of classes at Bryn Mawr is better known as "the end of written work" (declaimed in the same tone James Earl Jones might use for "the end of the world as we know it.")  After 5 pm today, the only piece of work I may require of (or accept from) students is a final exam or paper.  Late work requires authorization from the dean.  So there have been flurry of very firm deadlines facing my students this week in every class, and predictably they are pretty sleep deprived.

I can empathize. I went to sleep some time after 2 am Friday morning after a day spent binge writing a piece for Slate magazine.  On many levels, this sort of writing binge can be fun.  Now that Crash is away at Wonderful Jesuit University and writing (whiling?) away the night hours at the library, I have some virtual company while on an authorial bender.  We compare progress, we commiserate, we cheer each other on — all via text message.  There is a bit of nostalgia to it all, too.  When I was in high school and college, I spent many late night hours drinking endless cups of tea and typing papers at the kitchen table.  With five younger siblings it was the only time I could be sure of quiet!

These days it's amusing to see how lively my virtual life could be at those hours.  Between their residence in other time zones and their teen-tuned circadian rhythms, many of my nieces and nephews are posting away.  Student emails fly in (are they shocked when they get an answer back at 1 am, I wonder?). All things considered, though, I prefer a more contemplative pace when I write, and the chance it brings to let my prose marinate.

Like binge drinking, binge writing has risks.  I lose perspective, though unlike alcohol¹, which I suspect makes think you are better than you are, I tend to think my binge writing is awful, perhaps as bad as the paper this faculty member received.   And there is a serious downside to all that caffeine, unlike my college-aged self, I can't just topple into bed and fall asleep once I'm done.  I hit send on the email at 1:01 am, but had to wait another hour to unravel enough to climb into bed.

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1.  I discovered at the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop that alcohol and writing don't mix well.  It's not that it lowers my inhibition, it lowers my hourly word count. To zero.  One beer and I just sit there happily with my hands on the keyboard.  A lovely Assam on the other hand?  That works like a charm....

It's May, the month of May crownings (and in my Augustinian parish, St. Rita's Triduum) and final exams and graduations and tomato planting time....but what if God came calling while I was emptying the dishwasher?  Thomas Merton suggests the gift of such intimate encounters with God are "part of the normal equipment of Christian sanctity."  Is there such a thing as an ordinary mystic?  And are we brave enough to pray for the gift — or at least the desire for the gift?

"I sometimes wonder just what Mary was doing when the angel Gabriel appeared. Was she out for a long walk in the hills? Stopping to rest for a moment while hauling a heavy water jar from the village well? Or was she in the kitchen? Luke’s gospel tells us nothing. Whatever she had planned for that moment, for that day, I’m almost certain she did not imagine an angelic visitation. 

'How can this be?' she asked Gabriel. I can almost hear her thoughts, 'What are you doing here, in my kitchen, on this hillside, on the cool damp steps up from the well? Right now?'"

You can read the rest at Phaith....the photo is of my mother in roughly 1940, crowning Mary in her First Communion dress and veil, note the sea of identically veiled heads in the foreground!

I wrung 18 hours of silence out of last week's chaos.  Time enough for a conversation with Patient Spiritual Director and a long walk.  In the decade or so I have been visiting the old Jesuit Novitiate at Wernersville, I had never walked the path to the northeast corner, which overlooks Reading.  My ankle is healed enough to go "off-road" at last, so I walked down the hedgerows and looped back up the hill and to the overlook to take in this new-to-me view.  A reminder that even in the silence, the world is still there.

The next morning a large group was visiting for breakfast, a talk and tour.  In the face of this crowd I was taking my cues from Arsenius: fuge, tace, quiesce.  Wend my way through the babbling conversation in the dining room to the kitchen, make a cup of tea, and flee for the stillness and quiet of the eastern cloister.  On my way in, I saw what I had never seen before at Wernersville, a man in a navy blue jacket and tie striding down the first floor corridor, coat tails flying and talking a mile a minute on his cell phone, "The place is so (f*ng) uh, you know, enormous."  The expletive was (barely) edited out as he turned his head and caught sight of the open doors of the chapel.

Despite my desperate need for the silence, the morning's noise felt joyful.  This was just another new vista.  The world is still here, not held at arm's length from the stillness, but burrowed right into its center.
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For a visual walk through a day at Wernersville, see this post by Robin (we managed to overlap for 40 delightfully liminal minutes).  Her photos beautifully capture the vast stillness and warmth of the place.

Margaret Almon writes here of her husband's visits to Wernersville, along with some photos of the art to be found within.

I had forgotten the scent of dandelions.  At least until Tuesday, when in the early evening, I walked down a sun drenched hedgerow at the old Jesuit novitiate and was sent tumbling back into my childhood where the scent of dandelions wafted into my backyard from the vast expanse of lawn between the convent and St. Luke's parish church.

The smell heralded release.  The end of the school day, the end of the school year must be near when the scent of dandelions and new grass wafted through my backyard.

These days spring smells of licorice root mulch and with a whiff ozone from the copier ceaselessly churning out final exams.  I miss the scent of dandelions drifting through my window.

The last few weeks have been draining — for the most part unbloggably so.  I have a half-dozen blog posts sitting in "draft" mode, all languishing not such much because of what I say but because of what I don't say.  There is something about trying to write around the various elephants that have taken up residence on my desk, are calling me on the phone, and stomping around my family that I find siphons energy and life away from my words.  That, and my clear sense that despite all the mess my pachyderms are making, my life hasn't in anyway been upended in the ways that many others' have been this week — or even that my life has been in past Aprils.

The ability to see consolation in times of chaos is one grace I find in the Examen.  It's not the grace of a pair of rose colored glasses, it is a set of spectacles that bring both joys and difficulties into clear focus.  There is something about being able to delineate both the joys and difficulties of a day one by one, laying each before God with gratitude or with the request for healing and solace, that keeps the two in proper tension.  Chaos does not swamp out the joys, but neither does joy tuck the chaos under the rug.

One thing I see clearly at the moment:  I'm tired.  Time to take off my rose spectacles and go to bed.

 Several years ago, during the Easter season, the daughter of a friend received communion for the first time. Profoundly handicapped, she cannot see, walk or speak, but she adores music, and I love watching her face when I cantor the psalm. But when the alleluia burst forth, it so startled her that she lost her usual grin. I felt awful, though her father assured me afterwards that it was just that she couldn't see it coming. Literally!

Eric Whitacre's still and gentle Alleluia wouldn't startle anyone I suspect. I find in the frenzy of the end of the semester, following upon the intensity of the early part of this liturgical season, I don't always want my allelluias with trumpet blasts. The depth and stillness of this version sings to me of the enduring and healing grace of the resurrection in ways that the trumpets do not.  It's a balm...

One of the introductory writing courses has an assignment to interview faculty in fields they might major in about their scholarly writing process.  I did three of these interviews in the last week; as I did the third I realized that it was rather like the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant.  Each touched a part and extrapolated to the whole.

My interviewers each left having explored one or two facets of who I was as a writer and how I worked, but none have quite the whole of it as the starting point was my scholarly writing on my research in quantum mechanics (a particularly arcane example thereof is here).

One student did ask me if I ever wrote about anything besides chemistry.  Yes, I assured her, I did.  But she didn't ask me anything else about it.

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"Blind monks examining an elephant" by Itcho Hanabusa, photograph of woodcut from the Library of Congress.

At some level, the Spiritual Exercises never end, they simply flow out into everyday life - what some people call the Fifth Week.  Still, I am missing the discipline of this particular way of being intimate with God....

I love this bit of water, caught at just this moment of joy.  Blink and you might have missed it.  This last movement of the Exercises lets me be more attuned to what Easter joy looks like when it suddenly appears....in even the most unexpected places.

You can read my last reflection for the Ignatian Prayer Adventure on joy and God's joy in our presence at DotMagis.

Played in my study:

"I know the answer will be no, but I'm going to ask you anyway.."

And the question?

(a)  Can I have (the newly repaired) car?
(b)  Do you have $5 I could have for lunch?
(c)  Do you have a copy of the Bryn Mawr Commentary on Lysias?

And....it's (c).  Crash had 20 lines of Greek to translate.  But one car is back from the shop, all shiny and undented.  Woot!

 Here begins the lamentation of the prophet Jeremiah.
 How desolate lies the city that was once full of people:
the queen of nations has become as a widow;
the ruler of provinces is now subject to others.
By night she weeps in sorrow and tears run down her cheeks. —First Lamentation for Holy Thursday


From a reflection given at Morning Prayer on Holy Saturday three years ago:

I will admit to a guilty sense of relief when the Liturgy ends and we all go home - where I am confronted with the laundry and a messy kitchen and not with Christ on the cross. Poet T.S. Eliot recognized what underlies my ambivalence, “human kind cannot bear very much reality.”...

It’s a harrowing grace I seek on this day, to sit with the knowledge that Jesus has died, but not yet risen...
Psalm 69 offers a us a poignant yet powerful image of such an experience:

 I have entered the watery depths,
and the current has swept me away.
I am exhausted with my calling out.
My throat is hoarse.
My eyes fail from hoping for my God. 

 Holy Saturday is an invitation for us enter those depths, to let the current sweep us away, until we know what it is like to call for God until we are exhausted, to seek him until our eyes fail. Until we grasp what we proclaim at each celebration of the Eucharistic, until we comprehend what the first disciples did: Christ has died. For this one day, let us bear what reality we can.

I went to Morning Prayer this morning, the first breath of the Triduum.  The breezeway smelled of lilies and earth, we gathered in gentle silence in the small chapel, the tabernacle empty and open. The plea of the psalmist shivered in the air, "God of hosts, turn again, we implore you..."

I gave this  reflection last year at Morning Prayer on Holy Thurday morning, this year we had no homily, it was still and silent, and I liked the chance to listen to God present in the Body gathered to open these holiest of days.  I reflected again on how passionately we are loved, how much God desires us.  It takes my breath away.
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The last hours of Lent are upon us. Those of us who gave up things we enjoyed for the season may be longing to have them back. Personally I’m almost desperate for a turkey sandwich in my lunch.

For all that Lent is penitential, the sacrament that gives shape to the season is not confession, but baptism - the point of the penitential practices is to remember/renew what we became in our baptism.

Many years ago, in a course on the sacrament of initiation, the professor imagined for us what baptism at the Easter Vigil might have been like in the early days of the Church. Candidates were asked, “Do you believe in God the Father?” Assenting, their heads would be suddenly pushed under the water and held there until they were allowed up, undoubtedly gasping for breath. “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?” Once more they were plunged under the water. And again, “Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?” A third time submersion followed.

His evocative description reminds me of the story of a young man who wants to know how to find God. He goes to see a wise and holy hermit who promptly pushes the young man into the river and holds him under water. When the young man comes up gasping for breath, the hermit asks him what he most desired. “Air!” he responds. “Go home,” says the hermit, “and come back to me when you want God as much as you just wanted air.”

The second psalm (80) we prayed is the cry of a people who want God as much as air. Over and over again we pray: “God of hosts, bring us back…God of hosts, turn again, we implore you.” And in the very next canticle, God responds to his starving people through the prophet Isaiah, “With joy you will draw water” And in the Psalm (81) that follows, both in the Psalter and here again God promises to fill the emptiness of soul and body, “Open wide your mouths and I will fill them…Israel I will feed with finest wheat and fill them with honey from the rock.” We are cared for, protected.

But it’s what comes next in this liturgy that takes my breath away. The antiphon set for the Benedictus, the Gospel Canticle we are about to pray together, begins “I have longed to eat this meal with you…" We may indeed be longing for God, hoping that God will feed us, but we hear now that God is longing for us, desires to be with us. How willing? How deeply does God desire us? Jesus — God made man — has plunged into the depths, in the last moments gasping out His need for God, like air, “I thirst.” Eating of dirt and death, for us.

In the next days we will be plunged, ready or not, three times into the torrents of Christ’s passion, death and glorious resurrection: at the Mass of the Last Supper, in the Celebration of the Passion and at the Easter Vigil. May we come up from the waters of this birth the third time, knowing how desperately we want God, and even more, knowing how passionately God wants us.

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The image is of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret's Last Supper from the late 19th century, which reminds me a bit of Tanner's Annunciation.

From my most recent post at DotMagis on the Ignatian Adventure:

"As I walked into town for my meeting later, I thought about how difficult it was to move from threading my way through a mass of effervescent middle schoolers into the Passover crowds in Jerusalem, and to walk away from Jesus’ body in his mother’s lap out onto to the sidewalks of Bryn Mawr. Maybe it would have been better to keep these contemplations for the seclusion and quiet my study offers late at night?"

For me, at least, one grace of the Third Week of St. Ignatius' Exercises is that of presence in the midst of chaos, a way of being willing to face the difficult, the painful, the painfully confusing.  You can read the rest of this reflection here...

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For the record,  the sign inside my door, a gift from Crash, actually reads: The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me. — Thomas Merton