(Irony alert! I’m about to use words to describe the wordless.) When I went to Sky Farm in April, I was afraid God wouldn’t meet me there, and in a way, God didn’t. I arrived uncomfortably full of other people’s words about God. I needed interior privacy, a time to let other people’s ideas wait outside. “I needed the silence to be deafening,” Jennifer Knapp once said in an interview, and I can relate. (I wish the interviewer had asked her more about that silence.) Part of me was ready to abandon the whole idea of a God who can be known. What are we playing at, hanging words all over God? Maybe arriving with that question is what opened me to the one who did meet me at Sky Farm: the Great One, plain and powerful. A silent and undecorated presence, pouring out life—life that includes death. Near this presence, I knew myself to […]
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Plants and animals live in peaceful concord with the movement of the days and seasons, and I doubt that time stresses them out. They just live inside it. I, on the other hand, speak as if I were able to use time, make time, kill time, and even save time. Maybe time threatens me. At Sky Farm, I took an afternoon to reflect on the past year by looking back through my calendar. I faced a window that opened onto a wide green meadow, oak trees, and a denser forested area about 50 yards up the hill. A flock of wild turkeys took dust baths and rested in the long grass with their heads poking up. A window to my left let in a warm, gentle cross-breeze that brought me the smell of growing things. But! during my twenty minute march through my calendar, I didn’t once look up at or listen to or smile at […]
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Luke 10:41-42 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “…only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” At Sky Farm, I would set the meditation timer on my phone, then just sit. Or kneel. But what then? During the first few days, these silences were about letting the words drain away—or trying to, anyway. Words about God and prayer and Christianity. Words from books, sermons, blogs, videos, stories, songs, classes, conversations. Millions of words, accrued to me over decades. So I tilted my head to one side to let them pour out of my ear and into the ground. I knelt with my forehead to the carpet and let the words fall out the top of my head and disappear into the silence. Sometimes words are just clutter, something that blocks our view. In The Wisdom of the Desert, Thomas Merton […]
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All I do is find my thread, you know. ….—Father Dunstan, the monk who inherited Sky Farm Last week I had the chance to spend five nights at Sky Farm. Deep solitude. Deep silence. By deep silence, what I actually mean is the wind in the oaks, the California quail yelling chi-CA-go!, chi-CA-go!, the wild turkeys clucking and purring outside my window, the acorn woodpeckers jingling the birdfeeder as they gripped it with feet and tail to peck at the sunflower seeds. And under all these, a baseline silence, full, weighted, and strong, like an enormous magnet inside the Earth. Like gravity itself—I could hear it at Sky Farm. Bird calls and cicadas and wind above and in sync with the silence during the day, and in the night, inside my hermitage with the windows shut: silence. Blank and heavy, molten and rolling. On my first day, a quiet interior voice gave […]
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I’ve been walking outdoor labyrinths lately—I love doing this! I’ve experienced these labyrinths as enclosed, safe containers that hold me and all that’s growing in me… …spaces that honor interior privacy, thanks to the custom of silence and the narrowness of the path… …sources of nonlinear reverses and surprises that take me close to the center even when I have a long way to go… …patterns that guide people into nonhierarchical configurations, because the person who started in front of you is now next to you, now behind you, now in front of you again. An outdoor labyrinth is a holding space held by the larger holding space of Nature, which is held by the larger holding space of the Creator. It’s hard to escape the feminine imagery in all that I just wrote. When I’m open to receiving this generative aspect of the labyrinth, quieting my “how does it work” […]
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Psalm 33:6, ICEL God speaks: the heavens are made; God breathes: the stars shine. About 10,000 galaxies appear in the Hubble ultra-deep-field image. A detail is shown to the left, and the full image is at the bottom of this post. It’s a real picture, not an artist’s rendition, and some of the galaxies in it are more than 13 billion years old. Last week I had a dream in which I’m walking steadily up a hill, and I’m about five paces from the top. But no matter how many steps I take, I can’t crest the hill. The view stays the same: under my feet it’s an empty, dry-grass hillside. Everywhere else, space. Galaxies, stars, and nebulae are laid out before me, with inky blackness between them. No trees, houses, telephone poles, or mountains are on the horizon, and no clouds, moon, haze, or planets are in the sky. […]
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Praise! Give glory to God! Nations, peoples, give glory! Strong the love embracing us. Faithful the Lord for ever. (Ps. 117, ICEL) The ICEL Psalter, published in 1994 “for study and comment,” bears the imprimatur, a declaration from the Catholic church that a book is free of moral and doctrinal error. The imprimatur was revoked in 1998, apparently because of the translators’ use of gender-inclusive language. That was the end of the road for study and comment, as far as I know. The ICEL Psalter is out of print, and existing copies are expensive. What a shame. If you happen be one of the 38 people who worked on this beautiful and reverent translation (begun in 1964!), I thank you. Your work blesses me deeply and leads me closer to the living God.
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Psalm 69:18, ICEL Face me, I am desperate. The first time I walked the outdoor labyrinth at Mercy Center Burlingame was the first time I walked any labyrinth. I had no expectations. Right away, the path led me close to the center, which surprised me. Here so soon? But the path kept going, so I kept going. I turned, turned again, turned again. What I had done, I seemed to repeat. Then the path led me out to the edge where a pine tree threw deep shade, and sap and pinecone petals on the ground made the way less distinct. That edge is the place for tangents (which meet the edges of curves everywhere), and walking along it, I felt like I might fall right out of the circle. But that shady quadrant is close to the achieved center, if you just keep walking. When I turned the final corner and raised […]
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Psalm 51:6 You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. In the metaphor of the inner round table, I gather whatever is true inside me around the central and organizing Truth. That central and organizing Truth is like the steady flame of a candle. In gathering the parts of myself around it, I simply notice…and let it be. I’m trying to practice this more often: gently being present to what’s in me, both the parts of me that I like, and the parts that I’d just as soon pretend not to see. Who’s around the table today? Ah, I see you. Welcome. Maybe through this practice, I’m allowing God to bring about more of something that God desires: truth in my inward being. An alternative is that one of the “guests” takes over the party and moves into the center, throwing the other […]
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I was recently in western Michigan at a retreat, and I spent time with Lake Michigan—a living being, a new and subtle friend. The sun on the water, the rocks, the rain, the waves that were loud one day and quiet the next. A lake that curls like the ocean, yet smells like plain water. During the break one afternoon I swam, and it was a highlight of my trip. Even far from shore, the water was shallow enough that I could stand, waist deep, on ripples of soft sand. I had fun striding around out there, watching the clouds pass across the sun, watching the moods swing across the water’s surface as the bright light came and went. And then I noticed that we were alone, the lake and I. It was a private meeting, and so I started to sing. I sang Bruce Cockburn’s All the Diamonds, in its […]
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