This week’s guest blog is by Cathy
Maciariello. When Cathy is not at First
Presbyterian Church, she keeps busy in her
hometown of Atlanta, Illinois by volunteering at
the local library. You are likely to find her
with a book in hand, tending her flowerbed
during the growing seasons, and spinning many
tales about her trips around the world.
There is a place in you where you have never been
wounded, where there is still a sureness in you,
where there’s a seamlessness in you, where there’s a
confidence and tranquility in you. The intention of
prayer and spirituality and love is to now and again
visit that kind of inner sanctuary. (John O’Donohue,
Irish poet)
In college, I was that shy girl who never talked in
class. Truthfully, I was always so busy composing a
perfect and abidingly intelligent response to
whatever question was on the table that I just
missed my opportunity. I think I must have spoken
about three sentences during my entire college
classroom career. That’s not such a bad thing.
Reticence can be a blessing, since—with a little
time and distance—real meaning is free to emerge
from the shadow of self-conscious rhetoric.
This is why it has taken me some time to sort out my
experience at the Abbey of Gethsemani. I’ve been
waiting for the shadows to fade. Before we left for
Kentucky, my spiritual adviser told me not to expect
too much, repeating what a wise monk once told him:
“You get the retreat you get.” So I went, with as
few expectations as possible, but with the hope that
surely “something” would happen. I also went with a
powerful memory: that during the inscrutable times
of my life, God has shown a wonderful—if sometimes
exasperating—way of gathering uncertainty into
understanding and weaving the loose threads of my
experience into a comfortable tapestry—if I simply
have the patience to wait out the apparently
inexplicable and accept whatever image
appears—whether or not it resembles the meaning I am
trying to make on my own.
So for me to describe the impact of Gethsemani, I
need to back up a bit and talk about a couple of
those dangling threads….
Several months ago, I visited Muir Woods. I had
wanted to do this for a long time, and I expected to
be astounded. But what got to me wasn’t the trees.
On the bus from San Francisco, our driver pointed to
the massive granite walls hugging the road and said,
“These rocks are a billion years old. They’ve been
here since California rose up from the bottom of the
Pacific Ocean.” And then we flew on by. “Whoa, wait
a minute,” I wanted to say. “Stop! I need to touch
them.”
Later, in the natural redwood cathedral that is Muir
Woods—a place that should inspire prayer from
anyone—I couldn’t find the words. All I could think
about were those rock walls. Suddenly, the Creation
story became very real and very personal. I imagined
the excruciatingly hard work of it: God’s hands
lifting rock from the sea, laboring under the strain
of birthing a continent, nearly weeping with the
effort, and finally resting when the work was done.
And how many miles must Christ have walked even long
before those final crushing days in Jerusalem,
throat sore from all the preaching, callused feet
bone tired, heart breaking from the ineptitude of
his disciples? Theoretically, I understood all this,
but I had just never felt it.
Only Michelangelo’s breathtaking “Prisoners” at the
Accademia in Florence have ever given me anything
like this feeling—those massive, unforgettable
figures heaving, willing their way out of the stone
under the sculptor’s blade. In that moment in Muir
Woods, I knew the reassurance of God’s continuing
participation in Creation. Just as God suffered with
Christ on the cross, he also labored alongside
Michelangelo, and agonized with the deaf Beethoven
as he fought to bring his Ninth Symphony and all
those haunting late string quartets to life. God has
been and is with us in every moment of Creation no
matter how big or small—with the Apostle Paul and
Nelson Mandela in prison, with victims of abuse,
every woman in childbirth, every laborer in the
fields, every struggling 4th-grader trying to learn
multiplication tables, even with me in my garden,
feeling the pain of my blisters as if they were his
own. We are in this Creation thing together, and it
is hard work. Sometimes it hurts. And sometimes you
have a hard time praying in the midst of it.
The second memory I carried with me to Gethsemani
was a dream I had a few weeks ago. For some unknown
reason, I was walking somewhere carrying an
unidentified man on my back. While I felt his
weight, it wasn’t much of a burden, and he wrapped
himself around my shoulders in a way that was more
affectionate than demanding. I could feel his warm
breath even through my jacket. When evening came, I
laid him to sleep on the ground while I continued to
walk in place until morning. No progress on the
journey—just a lot of apparently meaningless
walking. I was working, but to no conceivable end. I
had no idea what to think of all this, and the dream
was still poking around at me when we arrived at the
Abbey.
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That’s where the monks come in. Here I was again—worrying myself
over the meaning I could make when God was already busy tying up the
loose ends for me. Early on that first morning we met Brother Paul
Quenon—fit, smiling, with penetrating eyes, an easy gift for
laughter, and a tiny notebook with his latest Haiku tucked away in a
pocket. Not to mention an unfiltered insight that must be possible
only for someone so attuned to silence and so unburdened by the
world’s intrusions. “God gives us too much,” he told us. “Think
about the abundance. It’s just too much to bear. Better not to talk
about it. We don’t.” I know that feeling.
I started paying closer attention to the monks and keeping time by
their prayers. Vigils, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline.
My own “work” of the retreat kept time with their daily work
responsibilities. I read and wrote between prayers, took a walk in
the woods with our little group, even found time for some shopping
in the gift shop. But always it was the prayers that drew me back.
Arriving early in the chapel, I would look forward to the doors
opening as the monks wandered in one by one to take their places, to
hearing their soft footsteps and the rustling of liturgical books,
to anticipating the subtle rhythmic chants of the psalms—to
disappearing into the “work” of the monks that is prayer.
Seven times a day they pray. Seven times a day, seven days a week,
until the end of time. The gift is nearly unbearable.
I began thinking about the relationship between prayer and work, a
relationship that, we know, helps define the monk’s day. Ora et
labora….prayer and work. What would life be like if we, too, shaped
our days like this? Would we be more purposeful in both working and
praying? Would the boundaries between work and prayer begin to blur
as they seem to do for the monks? Would we think of prayer as our
chief “work” or purpose? Would our daily work obligations start to
feel a lot more like prayer than meaningless walking in the night
toward some destination we can’t see? Would we call out to God
unabashedly in both pain and gratitude as we stretch our “Creation
muscles” in service to others? Would we live our lives in a simpler
rhythm that pulses with the transfusion that is God’s love—the love
Brother Paul told us was better embraced than discussed? Would we
stop trying to make our own meanings and let God have his way with
our hearts?
Sister Joan Chittester says in her book, Wisdom Distilled from the
Daily, “Work gives me a place in salvation. It helps redeem the
world from sin. It enables creation to go on creating. It brings us
all one step closer to what the Kingdom is meant to be….The purpose
of work…is to carry others, to care for them, and to see them safely
home.” I can think of nothing closer to prayer than this. The dream
of it—my dream—makes me smile. Ora et labora…when done with God, is
there really any difference?
Seven times a day they pray. Seven times a day, seven days a week,
until the end of time. Somewhere in the world a monk is praying for
me now—and will be for as long as I live. There’s an overwhelming
comfort in that, especially when I feel like I’m failing in my
Creation responsibilities, when the effort is just too much, when I
lose my way. What the monks gave me at Gethsemani was the
determination to just keep walking, the courage to wrap myself in
the tapestry God is making for me, and the freedom to let him turn
my footsteps into prayers.
[Cathy Maciariello of First Presbyterian Church in Lincoln] |
