The
first one of these I want to write about is prayer. The thing that draws me to
the Cistercian life, such as I know it and have experienced a little of it, is
the incorporation of the Office into daily life. It’s easy, relatively
speaking, to pray several times a day when I am on retreat, but back in my busy
daily world I need structure and discipline for it. I don’t limit my prayer to
the Office or the psalter, nor do I pray them nearly as faithfully as an actual
monastic would. But they are there and I do pray them every day. The psalms
have come to be something for me I never expected. They are a repository of
everything. They include the whole gamut of human emotion and they seem to be
full of so much of the heart of what it is to struggle in and with and towards
the Body of Christ. Sometimes they are so harsh, angry, and intense, and they
can be a little hard to say, even. What that internal dynamic calls me into is
a remembrance that Christ already knows my heart, as does the Father. The
psalms (and the Office in general, really, among other things) have also got me
to thinking quite a lot about things I never used to ponder with any depth,
such as the nature of the Trinity. I certainly don’t expect to figure out the nature
of the Trinity. It is doubtless one of those things that will always remain a
mystery. One of the things prayer is doing for me is helping me to be more
comfortable with mystery, with paradox. I keep moving into new spaces of this
and they are always challenging, sometimes even frightening. It’s really a
whole new world for me.
I
think I’m still a little intimidated by prayer sometimes. I have a “breath
prayer” (God, help me trust you; or, more formally, sometimes Abba,
plant your trust in me.) I often say a modified version of the Jesus
Prayer, though not with the dedication or frequency that the Pilgrim did by any
means, and I say the Our Father very often. Centering prayer, of late, brings
me to tears within seconds. I am not entirely sure why. I think I am afraid of
what prayer can do to and for my life. It has already changed it radically, or
been a big part of the matrix of conversion that has changed it. I am not sorry
for those changes and even cherish them. But they have also broken my heart a
bit in places; I ended a relationship with a brilliant, kind man I had been
with for just under three years and about whom I still care very much. I have
not begun another and, though I believe ending the relationship was right, I find
myself now struggling in solitude with the space around me from time to time.
It is really a beautiful space, but it is quiet and mysteriously intense in
ways companionship cannot be. It is pushing me into places of both healing and
fragmentation that I never expected.
The abbot
at Holy Spirit recently told a little story that helped me feel less singular and
lonesome about my prayer life. This was last month, at a retreat on prayer and
the image of God. The abbot spoke of how as a young monk he began to say the
Jesus Prayer. Kallistos Ware, a noted Orthodox theologian with whose work I am slightly
familiar, came to visit the monastery and told the young monk that he had been
using the Jesus Prayer to keep God at arm’s length, so to speak, to actually
distance God from his heart, as opposed to bringing Him in. The abbot went on
to say that for some time he just had to repeat “God loves me. God loves me,”
over and over. This story was reassuring to me in that it helped me see how my
own often over-intellectualized systems and structures of prayer are not truly
about opening to God’s presence in my heart, much of the time. Sometimes they
are, but more often than not I think I am at least a little afraid of true
intimacy with God. It’s usually easier for me to open my heart in prayer when I
am on retreat or in church, for sure. (Or out in nature, hiking or watching the
life of the summer forest happen around me.) So often I feel like my heart is a
big open dry field, crackling under a sky about to burst with a beneficent wall
of lightning that would burn it all up. That’s really okay, of course, if it’s
true. But it is a terribly vulnerable feeling for me. I feel that same thing
quite often in solitary centering prayer, too, but not always. As I said, lately
when I begin to center tears stream down my face within seconds. I have had the
tears show up in church (and in prayer and other times, too) at the monastery
every time I have ever visited, and lately it has been with increasing
frequency. The tears do not have to be attached to anything that’s being said
or sung or that I am thinking, although sometimes they are, as in my response
to Father Methodius’ Sunday morning homily after Father Malachy passed. I
suppose it is “the gift of tears.” At times I wonder what the gift is and what
it offers. A deeper movement into the heart of my conversion, I hope, though
who knows? The tears are just there. Sometimes the tears make me wonder if my
heart is not more aptly suited to being something like a Franciscan, with its
apparent emphasis on heart and emotionality, in contrast to the Cistercian
focus on the ordinary, on discipline, on simplicity. Perhaps that’s true. But
for now what I think is this: Cistercian spirituality, insofar as I am just beginning
to know its edges and corners, seems to offer me the solidity and structure
that I need. It challenges the parts of my personality that are not dominant
to begin to work with those that are in the work of deepening my life in the
Body of Christ.
