What follows is the partial draft for a work in progress, an accounting of the two year sabbatical dedicated to meditation. Out of this intensive period of meditation and scripture study, done under the supervision of my spiritual director and meditation teacher, the Prayer of the Lamb emerged as a sacramentally based, intercessory focused meditational prayer. In the following chapters I give the circumstances and motivation which developed into planning and then undertaking the sabbatical, what the structure of the sabbatical time was like, the meditation practice and learning that came from the whole process. No part of this material may be copied without permission.
Dedicated to Chris and Steve
While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.
Luke 24:4-5
Preface
At the stroke of midnight January 1, 2000, a group of parishioners and I, who had gathered around a living room coffee table, were feeding each other the bread and wine of the Eucharist. That liturgy was my last official act as their missioner and priest, and I was, as of that moment, unemployed. Being unemployed was part of the plan. It was the start of an extended sabbatical leave so that I could follow my heart's desire.
The purpose of this book is not just to report on my sabbatical, but to chronicle a spiritual process. What happens when someone takes on meditation practice for several hours a day for months on end? I offer an accounting of what I experienced and learned during a double Year of Jubilee, two years of sitting still, "letting the ground lie fallow." This was a time of no agenda, no expectations, no goals, no educational objectives. What emerged after fifteen months of meditation was both a surprise to me and no surprise at all.
For well over a year I sat in a room eleven feet by twelve feet, my cell, my poustinia, and in that space I undertook meditation practice for at least six hours each day. The remainder of the time each day was given to offering intercessions for various prayer requests, and reading the Daily Office – Morning and Evening Prayer – according to the practice of the Episcopal Church. Using the Daily Office lectionary for selections from holy scripture I spent time with the Hebrew and Greek texts, and aside from lexicons and grammars I read very little else other than the material my spiritual director had written. But the main focus and occupation, my work, was the forty-two plus hours a week of meditation. It is primarily about this that I write.
Jesus drew my heart to this meditation project. He called me out of a cultural Egypt of bondage, bondage to schedules and calendars, deadlines and productivity, into the desert wilderness of an interior landscape. And it was there in the desert that I was re-formed and my mind and heart transformed by the Prayer of the Heart, until I no longer yearned for the melons and leeks and garlic of Egypt, but was satisfied and delighted with nothing but manna.
Meditation is manna for me, a plain, simple form of nourishment. It is given, not cultivated. It comes without work or effort. It fades away and can't be stored up, even over night. But the next day meditation is again available, fresh and with nourishment just for that moment. "You can't live today on yesterday's blessing." That is an old saying that applies to meditation too. One cannot store up positive results of an hour of meditation as though to expect that to last all week. Benefit is there for whatever amount of meditation one does, but one cannot expect to see healing and transformation on an ongoing basis unless one drinks more deeply and consistently at this well.
The scope of this book covers the time of over a year focusing mainly on the meditation practice, and the following year in which a new ministry based on the meditation practice began to develop. I offer this as encouragement for all those who have said to me that they were attracted to what I was undertaking, expressing some desire to do the same themselves, but not thinking that possible for them at the time. My encouragement is to say that if we truly follow our heart’s desire and are willing to be open to the unknown, then it is truly possible for life’s circumstances to flow together in such a way that it happens. The path is one of surrendered trust, in other words, faith. In terms of following through on the faith we express, this is where the rubber hits the road. I’m here to say that this path is utterly dependable. I have not been disappointed.
Sunday Without a Pulpit
[A poem written at the beginning of the sabbatical, the first Sunday I could go visit another church. The setting is in the lower Yakima Valley among orchards, vineyards and hops fields. Many apple growers were pulling out certain varieties of apple trees because the bottom had fallen out of that market, or other kinds of apples were more popular.]
I saw today stumps
of apple trees
laid out in long, straight rows,
each with its own solitary shadow from a wintry sun -
tombstones of yesterday's orchard -
where once sweet orbs of fecundity had hung
amidst multitudinous green, breathing leaves.
To everything there is a season.
Yet here human impatience and pragmatism
showed no respect for elders -
the thickened stumps gave witness -
the natural course denied,
no fallen fruit feeding the earth,
no fallen trees crumbled by age,
just sterile, industrial ranks,
mute reminders of what happens to all
who cannot fill the production quota
or whose fruit falls out of fashion.
I came as a stranger today
to a homey congregation buoyant and chatty,
where people sat in long, straight rows
still breathing, sometimes heavily with sleep.
I was amazed how in the course of a few minutes
one man, from what must have been long practice,
bowed his head and snored
through all the preacher's words,
resurrecting on cue
to sing heartily the hymn that followed.
They all knew the routine,
each part of the liturgy following in familiar order.
The words raced by.
There was an orderly stampede to the communion rail
and another back again to the long, straight rows.
Expedient it was - impatient and pragmatic
and asleep.
No time to sit awake,
to send out fresh shoots
for green, breathing leaves
or swelling globes to make the mouth water.
How to catch their attention, I thought,
to clap my hands and break the spell
and rouse them from their open-eyed sleep?
To everything there is a season,
a time to work
and a time for sabbath.
Shall I shout into the wind?
Will my refusal to oblige production quotas
make one iota of difference?
Will the fruit of all my labor be out of fashion?
But I will sit with eyes closed and wide awake,
breathing,
letting fecundity unfold in its natural season
with patience
and caring not one wit about pragmatism.
January 2, 2000
Chapter 1
Death
The news of death can change everything in a moment. That is what happened when Chris and Steve died. There was nothing to prepare for such an untimely death of two young men vibrant with life, health, and joy, full of the potential of the future, eager, enthusiastic and curious about the world before them. It was their curiosity and youthful recklessness that led to their deaths so unexpectedly in that abandoned mine on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille.
Chris was my daughter Elizabeth's husband of less than a year, a Minnesota boy from a farm community near the Canadian border. His full name was Christopher Robin Homstad, named after THE Christopher Robin, and he was very much like his name sake: a delightfully balanced person, without guile, not afraid to bare his emotions, compassionate, resourceful and always down to earth. People loved him immediately upon meeting him, and he and Liz together welcomed all their friends into the circle of their home, the beginnings of a family they were making that would be outgoing and hospitable and all inclusive.
The day of their wedding at a state park in Minnesota Chris wept tears of joy during the entire liturgy. I also was so happy for them both. This was a good match. I knew, and this was more than just partiality because of family. I had been their pre-marital counselor. This isn't usually done. When they first asked me to do this for them a year before the wedding, I said no. "Chris, do you really want your future mother-in-law doing your premarital counseling?!" I gave them a list of priests in the area plus the bishop's name, and they dutiful visited with them and checked each one off their list. Then they came back, and Chris told me that of all the ones they talked with he felt most comfortable with me.
So I consented. But I didn't let them off easy. For the next several months they made trips back and forth across the state of Minnesota from Moorhead State University to Duluth for the counseling sessions, took the standard pre-marital inventory that I routinely used, and went over the results with me. And believe me, I went over every detail with them looking for possible trouble areas, exploring with them patterns of communication and how they handled conflict as well as the spiritual foundation of marriage and questions of faith, and even sex. The inventory I used was not for the purpose of predicting a successful marriage, but one could tell, by looking at the profile it provided, much about compatibility and how well matched the couple was. Of all the couples I had counseled Liz and Chris had the best profile I had ever seen, passing even the scores of couples older and more mature. About the only thing I could think to warn them about (since I felt it my duty to not let them get too self assured about their relationship) was to tell them that as they moved from one stage of life to another over the years they should take care to re-commitment themselves to each other. Since there was the danger that they would be so familiar and comfortable with each other, they might get bored and could take each other for granted.
Liz and Chris had just completed college. Their graduation was a wonderful family gathering time, and after the big day, Liz's father and I went canoeing with them down the Crow Wing River camping overnight at a state park. They then spent the next couple of weeks packing up their belongings and saying good-bye to all their friends who were likewise scattering to the winds. With a friend in tow (as was often the case) they drove across Montana into Spokane and down to Prosser in the south central part of Washington where I was ministering. The plan was for them to live with me that summer as they reconnoitered the state looking for jobs.
The kids arrived and unloaded all their household goods into the storage shed, and Chris promptly was out about the little town of Prosser scouting out possibilities for jobs for the summer. He was a drummer and had performed with the Moorhead State University orchestra and a rock band there. Already he was checking out possible gigs in this area.
They stayed one night and then headed back up to Spokane for the weekend where they planned to be with Liz's cousin Steve for his 28th birthday along with some time on the houseboat at Bayview on Lake Pend Oreille.
Stephen Rogers Novak was the son of my brother-in-law Terry and my sister Barbara. Something needs to be said about just how much he meant to both of them. He was Terry's son from Terry's first marriage, and Barbara's son by deep love and attachment as well as legal adoption. Steve was a precocious and hyperactive teenager when his mother literally deposited him on Barb and Terry's doorstep shortly after they were married. She couldn't handle him and so in essence walked away from him. Not too long after that she took his younger brother David and left for Australia. It could have been a really bad set up for such a teenager foisted unexpectedly onto the honeymooners, but Barb embraced this partially formed and erupting young man and opened her heart to him. She stood silently by when Steve came up against his birth mother's rejection of him, and offered in exchange a loyalty that was firm and stable for Steve to turn to.
For Barbara this was the child she was not able to have herself. Illness earlier in her twenties nearly took her life and left her with abdominal problems and one ovary. She and Terry tried to conceive but even after extensive medical intervention finally gave up the hope. Instead on Steve's 21st birthday the family gathered in the judge's chambers for a brief but lovely ceremony of adoption to make official what was already a deeply held fact in their lives. Steve was Barbara's son. Period. He was never referred to as adopted. Barb was never referred to as stepmother.
Steve had attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. After graduation he had spent half a year in the Far East having adventures and exploring that part of the world and himself. He spent some time in a Buddhist monastery learning some meditation and formulating a plan that would emerge into his career and vocation. When he came back he had the modest beginnings for an import business for handicraft items from Nepal. He started by selling tee shirts, jewelry, sweaters and singing bowls on college campuses, and slowly the business grew. Steve made regular trips back to Nepal cultivating relationships with the crafts people. We did not know at the time but found out later that Steve had been applying an ethic to his business dealings that aimed at making a positive difference for these beautiful people and their country. He offered a fair exchange for the goods the crafts people made, and he participated in public service projects in Nepal while he was there, such as reforestation efforts. Here in the United States Steve was quietly generous. Much of this was discovered by the family only later after his death.
Each of the members of my family can relate their own story of June 10, 1995, but I will tell the story only from my own perspective. We were all impacted horrendously, each of us suffering exquisitely individualized pain and grief. The loss was experienced differently and responded to differently by each of us, but it did not separate us. It was a time when the family drew closer together in love and support of one another. I am very grateful for that.
It was a Saturday, and I had various appointments on the calendar. In between them I had the opportunity to stop by the house briefly, and I checked the answering machine. It was 2:00 PM. There was a message from my mother left mid-morning, and as I listened to it I had a pronounced sense of anxiety and dread whelm up. But the message from my mother was simply a rambling narration of how Liz and Chris and Steve had gone with Terry to the houseboat, what they were planning on doing, and how they were having a good time. I found myself listening to the message waiting for her to tell me the bad news, but it never came. Mom mentioned that they were planning to explore the old mine, a site that both she and I had been in with Steve on past occasions. The mention of the mine intensified that sense of dread. Something seemed very wrong, but since the message from the morning was cheery and unconcerned, I felt confused. I noted with a bit of worried curiosity this confusion, but then left the house for the next appointment of the day.
Back home an hour or so later the phone rang and it was Mom again. She had gotten word from Barb that Terry had called, something about an accident in the mine, a rescue team was on the way, and there was no way to know if Chris and Steve were all right. Liz had not gone with them into the mine having decided to do some reading instead, so she had been safe with Terry on board the houseboat.
I headed for Spokane and my parents’ home immediately. The three hour drive took me two and a half. All I knew for sure was that something had happened to Steve and Chris. As I drove at break-neck speed, I prayed with all my being. But how to pray? I wanted Chris and Steve preserved, rescued, safe. But I knew I also had to be prepared that maybe that would not be the case. So I wanted to pray that if injured they would not be maimed or paralyzed or suffer a head injury. But again I knew there could be no guarantee about that. So I wanted to pray that whatever their injuries we all would be able to stand by them through the medical crisis and recuperation no matter how devastating or how lengthy. Or if it was the unthinkable, what then?
Thus I prayed intensely as I drove, watching the landscape and the heavy rain clouds to the north and east, the same direction I was driving. As I approached Spokane those rain clouds dominated the field of vision, but no rain fell. Instead there appeared a large rainbow that stayed in view for nearly an hour until I got close to Spokane. I looked at that rainbow and knew in my bones that God was communicating an age-old promise. It wasn’t a promise that everything would be all right. It was a promise that no matter what happened, we would not be abandoned; God would be with us. That was the rock bottom reality I could count on; that was the essence of the conversation of prayer there in the car on the way to bad news.
My father at this time was under hospice care, slowly dying of emphysema. The place for me to be during this crisis was with him and my mother waiting for word from Bayview. As I rushed from the car into the apartment they sobbed out the news I had dreaded to hear. Both were dead, suffocated. I held my parents in my arms and screamed my protest through gritted teeth. Barb and Terry and Liz arrived not too long after that, and with the rain now falling I took my daughter in my arms as she got out of the car, my dear, sweet daughter whom I would have protected from such a thing with my own life if I could.
Then began the intense time of acute grief for us all. The next several days we walked numbly through all the things that had to be done, notifying other family members, asking and answering questions about what happened, making arrangements for funerals, receiving casseroles and salads from friends and church members with deep appreciation for their expressions of loving care, but hardly having the opportunity or energy to eat. It seemed like we were all holding our breath. Every once in a while one of us would take a deep breath that emitted a sigh, and it would be a cue to the rest of us to remember to breathe. And all the time was the sound of my father’s air concentrator in the background with its continual rhythm of sucking in air and puffing it out through clear plastic tubes so that my father who was slowly suffocating could continue breathing a little longer. “Today I lost half my grandsons,” he gasped. The estimated time of death was 2:00 PM. Some 230 miles away I had sensed what had happened.
These were deaths that should not have been. Their suddenness and pointlessness shocked the sensibilities. We struggled with all the absurdity of this. They say, “Parents should not have to bury their children.” But we all know that this happens anyway, and when it does it is as though we bury our own future. Deaths such as these place faith on the line. How we respond in the expression of faith in the face of such loss reveals much. To say that God took them or that God must have a reason is utter ignorance and denial. It is avoidance of the reality of simply the way things are. To put what had happened into the context of God’s greater plan for them and for us is to make God a sadistic monster. Nor can there be any claims that this was unfair or as a punishment or was the work of the Enemy to persecute us. It just simply happened. Chris and Steve unknowingly entered an environment that would not support breath, so they died.
The faith response was twofold. First was the trust that no matter what happened God was present, the irreducible understanding that this had to be so. God being present was a comfort, but not a comfort that allowed denial of the horribleness of what had happened. Rather it was a comfort that could look at the hard reality and know that we would come through it, we would keep going. We would not be alone. God was bigger than all this and could embrace all the grief and anguish of the heart.
When Jesus died on the cross, he did that intentionally. After a full ministry of telling others about the reality of the “Kingdom of God” and the most abundant kind of Life, and showing this reality through what he did in healing and liberating demon-bound persons, Jesus took the message to the ultimate level. He took upon himself all the suffering of humankind, all the pain, all the loss, took it all into himself and took it all into death. Jesus lay down his life in the way of the cross and took it up again as the Resurrection. Nobody killed him. This complete pouring out of himself in this manner was for the purpose of moving beyond death into resurrection life, and now for us life in identity with the One who said he was the Life opens to infinity. Thus Jesus makes resurrection life accessible to all.
All of our grief and suffering was taken into that sacrifice and held in the love of the Lamb of God. The possibility of healing was there for each of us from the moment of their deaths. The access to our healing from the suffering of our hearts was always there. That is the way of God’s mercy, ready before we ask.
The second faith response was the choice for life. This was the intentional decision to move in the direction of life and what was meaningful for life in the future. For my daughter this was to grieve well and face her loss with utmost realism, and when she had plumbed the depths to emerge and live life fully. She got a puppy and that little golden retriever was a focus of life for her. She took up skydiving and experienced wide-awake life of great immediacy, and went on to contribute vibrant life and energy to her elementary school students.
For my sister this faith response was to look at what Steve had been doing through his import business, and when it was discovered how he had been making a quiet but significant difference in many lives in Nepal, she became determined to continue his work. This would expand to the establishment of a foundation in his name that would bring her into a small village in the mountains of Nepal that could only be reached by a two hour hike after the road came to an end, a village so poor that they didn’t even have garbage. There the foundation would help with a school, providing repairs to the building, bringing in educational supplies, building the first toilets in the village, and providing a hope for the future to villagers whose entire income went to their landlords.
For me these deaths and the faith response would push me to the bottom line of what was most important.
Chapter 2
Pilgrimage
Christmas of 1995 was poignant, to say the least. My mother, sister, brother-in-law and I were spending a quiet afternoon together. My father had died on All Souls Day, November 2, five months after his grandsons’ deaths, a much more understandable death, if one can say that, since he had come to the fullness of days, and in death he was released from the torturous ravages of emphysema that had sucked the life out of him during his last several years. His last breath was witnessed by my mother, sister and me, all of us on Mom and Dad’s bed with him, holding his still hands and praying the prayers at the time of death from the Book of Common Prayer.
Now on this Christmas afternoon our discussion was about responding in a life-giving way to all these deaths and all this loss, doing something positive, bringing some meaning to it all, giving the grief a purpose. Barb stated that what she needed to do was to go to Nepal and meet the crafts people that Steve had worked with. I said I needed to go back to the Holy Land and Jerusalem, to make another pilgrimage to the geographical center of the Gospels. “Why don’t I meet you in Bangkok, Barb, and go with you to Kathmandu. From there I could go to Tel Aviv and spend time in Israel and Palestine before coming home. I have friends in Hong Kong and in Paris I could visit. I feel that I just want to head west and keep going until I get home again.” My mother said that she felt the need to go back to Great Britain and see her cousins again. And then she did some thinking out loud. Why not take Liz with her, the two widows traveling together, and why not first meet me in Tel Aviv? I could show them the significant pilgrim sites, and then they could go on to England and Scotland where Mom would introduce her granddaughter to this part of the family.
My brother-in-law, who had been city manager of Spokane and used to organizing and running an entire city, sat and watched what was going on. Then he said, “I think I have just seen a miracle take place. Three women just planned to meet each other in different places on the other side of the world.” In a family where our tongue-in-cheek motto has been, “Decisions are precious, don’t waist them,” we had just made a whole series of momentous decisions. Strength, resilience, determination, or a moment of mutual surrender to the breeze of the Spirit stirring our hearts – whatever it was within us, it was a driving force to stand in the face of death and say, “You will not have the last word.”
Pilgrimage for me has been a significant spiritual exercise. Being physically present where an event has occurred is a way to connect with the event in a much deeper way than cognitively or in the imagination. Locations associated with events in the story of faith carry attributed meaning that pilgrims draw upon for the nurturing of their own faith. My first pilgrimage had been a Sunday drive from the spot in the east London suburbs where the tavern of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales had been to Canterbury Cathedral to stand in the same place where Becket had been martyred. My cousin Tom (who had worked for Scotland Yard) pinched a stone from the ancient Roman wall that had encircled the city, and gave it to me as a souvenir. Ever since I have been picking up stones and potsherds from places associated with the holy and linked to stories of faith.
This pilgrimage, coincidently in April, was a spiritual exercise of praying my way around the world. When Chris and Steve died currently there had been sustained fighting in Bosnia. The grief I was experiencing somehow seemed linked to the grief of other wives and mothers who had lost husband and sons suddenly and terribly. Liz and Mom and Barb and I had instantly joined the ranks of all those other grieving women. We shared a common sisterhood of tears and anguish.
Journal entry, first day of the pilgrimage:
Vancouver was overcast. I had hoped for a sunny day so that I could look into leaving the airport for a while, but it wasn't meant to be. Instead I was given some transition time there at the airport to get used to my luggage and where I had packed everything. Thoughts on the flight from Seattle to Vancouver: "our reach exceeds our grasp." For myself I find the image of reaching up, reaching out away from the planet an expression of my own inner ambition for going beyond myself. This desire for going beyond myself is spiritual, but is also intellectual - a desire to learn, to expand knowledge, to gain wisdom. Spiritual - a desire to touch the Holy. This also includes a desire to become holy. And it is also a physical image reaching skyward - the desire to soar, to fly, to travel through space. Perhaps this is a desire to escape from this plane of existence, but I really think that for me, I am reaching out to the unknown, seeking the something more. I do think this is tied in to the human quality that at its best seeks to go beyond itself and improve, strive for wholeness, perfection. In my spiritual journey, earth bound as it is, it is as though every few steps I pause to jump up trying to catch something more. We humans do have higher aspirations at times, not always bent on darkness and violence. I think that our aspiration to reach higher comes from being made in the image of God. We are trying to become what we are meant to be. But too often our human pride gets mixed in there. We/I become proud of what I think are my own accomplishments. On this trip my reach is exceeding my grasp. It is hard for me at this point to grasp the entire significance of what I have reached for. Because I am only one part of the equation. I have a sense of destiny to go on this pilgrimage, to make a sacred circle of active prayer around the planet, and there is also the hope that I will be embodying greater prayers than mine, that I will be a conduit for God's ministry, service as I walk these steps of this pilgrimage.
As I traveled westward around the planet I went from one culture to the next in quick succession. The landscape and climate changed, the architecture changed, the clothing people wore changed, the food we ate changed, the color of skin and eyes and hair changed, facial features changed, language changed. Yet the common bond of humanity didn’t change, but was persistently present wherever I went. I prayed in solidarity with those who grieved in every place I visited. My own grief was put into a perspective far vaster. This did not diminish the reality of my own pain, but somehow was a strange comfort.
Despite grief, life went on all over the planet. Death was not the end of things. The river of life kept flowing relentlessly, muddy with all our pollution, teeming with life like the river in Bangkok used as a thoroughfare for getting from one part of the city to another, or the holy river in Nepal into which the ashes from the cremation pyres were poured, one of the rivers that flow into the Ganges, or the Jordan River that gets brackish as it approaches the Dead Sea, or the Seine surrounded by the elegant and civilized city of Paris, one symbol of the prominence of western European culture. Life flowed and took me, and all of us, with it. Yesterday was gone. Tomorrow is but a mental construct of the imagination. Live life now, or you will merely have sleep walked through life. Wake up!
The westward journey brought me back to where I had started, and I got home with a profound sense of just how small the planet is and how much of a closed, contained, finite unit it is. This is a spaceship carrying us through vast expanses of stellar oceans, a tiny vessel with just so much room for us all. My view of the world had shifted.
And now that I was home again, I had the realization that the pilgrimage was not finished. There was another holy place that I needed to travel to, but this kind of travel would be different. This would be a journey within. I was filled with a profound sense of a need to sit still. A voice inside seemed to be saying that I had to stop doing what I was doing and sit down and be quiet and listen. With this on the agenda, I went to Seattle for one of my regular visits with my spiritual director.
Jerry Hanna, executive director of the Center for Spiritual Development, has had over thirty years experience and expertise in meditation practice, teaching meditation and in spiritual direction. When I first moved to Washington State I spent six or eight months searching for a spiritual director. After several interviews with various prospective spiritual directors, I settled on Jerry, mainly because he was a priest of my own denomination and he genuinely seemed to take me seriously. I was not disappointed. Our sessions together were characterized by his willingness to give me his full attention and not to interject anything that could be his own agenda. He truly did take seriously whatever I brought to him to work on, and always told the truth. I could trust him.
A few weeks after Chris and Steve died I took a week for a retreat in Seattle so that I could face and work with some of my own grief. I had been giving support to the other members of my family, but I too was grieving and needed to be ministered too. As we met together each day, Jerry was a strong and gentle presence of Christ for me. Since the deaths I had not felt able to return to presiding at the Eucharist. Indeed each Sunday as I sat in the congregation, I was overwhelmed with tears. Death is central in the Eucharist – the Lamb of God, the Paschal Victim, the one, perfect and sufficient sacrifice freely given in love of us. Here in the Eucharist my heart opens to this Feast of the Cross, this Supper of the Lamb, that joins heaven and earth, so that my voice joins with angels and archangels and all the choirs of heaven. The liturgy strikes something immensely intimate within me. As I attended the midweek Eucharists at St. Mark’s Cathedral, Jerry gently invited me into taking a part, and I found that I could again participate as a priest without dissolving in tears. Healing had begun.
It was June, one year later, and I was going to Seattle for my regularly scheduled appointment for spiritual direction. I knew that Jerry taught meditation, but I had not really talked much with him about it during our sessions together. I always seemed to have had lots else as the focus of attention, lots of ministry issues, personal relationship issues and concerns about discernment. But now I knew that I needed to sit still and listen. Great, I thought, I will ask Jerry if he knows of any retreats during the summer where I could go and just be quiet for a week. He could probably help me figure out just how to be able to sit and be quiet.
As I entered Jerry’s office we exchanged the usual greetings – hi, how are you, what’s up. I asked how Jerry’s summer was going so far. He began to tell me about the summer retreat he was planning. My interest immediately locked on to this. So I told him of this felt need to spend a week just sitting still and being quiet, but I had only a little experience in meditation, most of it of the dogged determination kind, forcing myself to go through a spiritual exercise because I knew intellectually that this was a good, traditional practice of Christian spirituality. But I had not felt like such efforts at meditation had born much fruit. My prayer practice instead had been much more active, deeply devotional, and full of mental activity. Jerry suggested that I join the others on the retreat, sitting with them in the formal meditation sessions for just as much or as little as I felt comfortable with. If the meditation was not my cup of tea I could always get up and go for a walk on the beach or in the woods or read a book. I would be responsible for my own use of the time. That way, even though the others attending were all experienced meditators, I need not feel intimidated or required to “keep up” with them. That all sounded very attractive to me. The location, which made it all the better, was at a conference center on Whidbey Island, a beautiful place in Puget Sound with a view stretching out the Straits of Juan de Fuca towards the ocean. One last question – when was this retreat to take place? Jerry named the one week on my calendar in which I would not have to change anything previously scheduled. I could feel goose bumps arise. More and more this had the sense of a divine set up. My name was added to the list.
I began that week with some brief instruction from Jerry, looking around at the fourteen others present, a diverse group in terms of ages and education and careers and life experience. And then we began to meditate together. There is something about meditation in community that is different from one’s own efforts at meditation alone. The combined intention and focus of attention on the practice of sitting in silence supports each individual’s practice. The effect can be a perception of intensification, expansion of awareness, or deeper sense of practice. For me as a beginner, the corporate effect of the community buoyed me up and carried me along with them. Not only did I stay for the entire first sitting, I continued with each of the sessions for the whole week. The sense of great effort and forced concentration with which I had attempted meditation in the past dissolved into a remarkable ease that the body seemed to relish.
My experiences during those meditation sittings were typical of beginners; they were florid with mental images, many which seemed truly helpful and insightful. It was the phenomena of sitting down long enough and being quiet with the intention of listening that opened the flood gates for so much of what wanted to come to the surface of awareness and be expressed. This had a tremendously renewing effect for simple trust or faith in God. I knew that healing was taking place within on a very deep level.
The journal entry for Saturday, July 27, the last day of retreat had this: “Morning meditations - strong image of the 15 of us in our circle and the walls around us dissolving and disappearing. We were surrounded only by blue sky and a few white puffy clouds. The circle was radiant with light, and the light seemed both to be coming in among us and going out from us. Powerful. Then the final ‘vision’ - I found myself breathing deeply during the meditation after the chanting. I become aware of just how deeply I was breathing, unlike how I had been breathing all this last year. Then it was as though Dad was beside me. He too was breathing deeply and freely and he was happy and he was urging me on to breathe deeply too.… The week is complete, the retreat has been completed, the goal has been fulfilled. I will take home this experience and will continue to meditate with this same community and others. This was the best thing I could have done for myself.”
It became apparent to me in a very short time after the retreat that my life had turned a corner, had taken a new course. The aftereffects of this week of meditation propelled me into a regular daily meditation practice that soon became a deeply engrained habit. I got up earlier in the morning in order to assure that the time would be in the schedule, and not one day went by without sitting in meditation. Because of the significant aspect of the community in supporting the practice of meditation, I looked around at who in the congregations I was serving and who in the larger community might also be interested in meditation. Within a few months a small meditation group was formed that then continued to meet once every other week for the next three years as long as I lived in that area. I arranged my trips to Seattle for spiritual direction (200 miles one way) to coincide with Saturday day-long meditation retreats. Obviously this was a seriously life changing spiritual practice I had begun.
Chapter 3
The Sabbatical Begins
As the sabbatical got underway, I found myself tremendously energized even in the midst of transition. The sabbatical had been two and a half years in the planning, and so it was most gratifying to see the plans turn into actuality. It started with the encouragement of my Spiritual Director, the Rev. Jerry Hanna, to dare to go beyond dreaming about what I would really like to do. The CREDO career consultation conference sponsored by the Cornerstone Project and the Church Pension Fund in May of 1998 encouraged me to think big and make audacious plans. So I did, and here I was.
Much of what made it possible was thanks to many friends, colleagues, church associations, and family who offered me support through both their prayers and gifts. I was deeply impressed with the wonderful generosity that responded to my "shameless begging" letter that I had sent out to everyone I knew. I had told them what my plans were and asked if they would like to make a pledge of support. They responded by giving me thousands of dollars! What this showed me was that we humans have the need to give, and often giving is a way to participate, a vicarious connection. The notes I received contained comments about how what I was doing was something others valued and would like to have done more of themselves. This confirmed for me the sense that Christ's Spirit was telling me that this work of meditation was indeed a form of intercession, of offering for all of these supporters.
This also has helped me deal with the questioning that came up from one or two others, and myself, about taking the time away from a significant ministry as an Episcopal priest developing congregational ministry just to "sit around and do nothing," i. e., meditate. We are such an action oriented, production oriented society, and this does have an influence on our thinking even within the faith community. It seems immoral to be "unproductive," not to be able to show "tangible" results, like church growth or educational degrees or so many services performed or people served. How can one quantify the spiritual? How can one measure the Spirit?
The questions are all wrong. Production is worthless if the product isn't made well enough, if the crafter isn't skilled, if the product isn't what will sell. God knows the Church needs insight and focus as to what is of most value, what direction to take to be faithful in our calling, to be faithful to the Gospel. For all the tremendous things about congregational ministry and baptismal ministry development that I have been privileged to contribute to, I still look at it and wonder if we are ending up maintaining too much of what the Church has always been doing and not enough of getting to the core meaning and value of the ministry of the Church. So these pragmatic considerations contributed to the deeply felt necessity I had to do what I was now doing--or not doing.
Confirmations--if ever I needed them! I could truthfully say that I did not encounter any "closed doors." There had been a sense of one door opening after another with an ease which boarders on the eerie. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, a Roman Catholic order in the Seattle area, were tremendously welcoming in offering me room and board with them and full use of their facilities. During the time of packing, garage sale, and moving stuff to storage I was blest with many offers of help. I never went in need of muscle power when I asked; it was incredible! I even had two offers to drive me and my personal belongings over the mountain pass in January to get me to Seattle.
But the best confirmation was the one that involved the sale of my house. After months of sitting there on the market nothing was happening. Still I had the sense of no need for anxiety. My position as Regional Missioner for the Diocese of Spokane was coming to an end officially December 31, 1999, and January 1, 2000, would officially begin my two-year study leave. The final week in December I was in Seattle with Jerry covering some final details before the sabbatical was to begin.
“Well,” I said, “everything is ready to go, except the sale of the house. What am I to do? I don’t want this to delay the beginning of the sabbatical.”
“You’re a Franciscan, aren’t you?” Jerry asked.
“Yes?”
“You could always give your house away.”
The moment the words were out of his mouth, something inside me leaped for joy. Just how much power did that house have over me? Could I walk away from it? Would this be reckless and imprudent? None of this seemed to matter. If it took the sacrifice of the house and the bit of equity I would get from the sale to open the last door to the beginning of the sabbatical, then I would gladly give it away.
Returning home the first thing I did was to call the diocesan planned giving officer and tell him that I wanted to gift my house to the diocese. If they could pick up the house payments until it sold, they could have all the equity to do with what they wanted. He was delighted. But first, he said, he would need to take this to the board of directors of the diocese, the diocesan financial officer, the bishop, and the diocesan council. We looked at when all these folks had their next meetings, and the schedule stretched out over the next several weeks. Fine, we agreed, but in the meantime the house will still be on the market.
The end of December came; I was officially terminating as Regional Missioner. I had received my last paycheck. I wanted to get over to Seattle before the end of January. The first week of the first month of the first year of the first century of the next millennium (ano domini) there was a flurry of people in to see the house. By the end of that week a nice young couple with family in the area had offered a bid on the house, I made a counter offer which they accepted, and the house was sold. The closing was February 1! I love God's sense of humor, even when it seems I am the one being teased. I tithed the proceeds from the sale of the house to the diocese, and the rest of the sale went to finance the sabbatical, along with the gifts and pledges from many donors.
So there I was, settling into a new environment, stripped of most of my possessions, without a job and without a set agenda for what was to come next, and at that point I didn't seem to have any desire to look back. Instead I was eager to get down to business meditating and luxuriating in my Hebrew and Greek studies of the Scriptures. The good-byes were sweet, some good tears and endearments, but my eyes were turned westward and I couldn't be sad.
I wrote my first newsletter to all those supporting this undertaking while sitting at my desk in front of the large picture window in my room on the top floor of Cusack Hall of St. Mary’s Convent in Bellevue, Washington, looking west through a gap in the towering cedars at Lake Washington, the north end of Mercer Island, Seattle beyond, and beyond that the Olympic Mountains. The sun was shining and my heart was singing. God has made all things well.
Chapter 4
The Meditation Practice is Engaged
Many people were supporting me on this spiritual project, both financial supporters and those cheering me on with comments about their interest in what I was doing. Frequently those comments were about how they viewed what I was doing as important and something they would love to do, but didn’t see as possible for themselves at the moment. I had promised to keep them all informed through a periodic newsletter, and during the course of the sabbatical I sent out seventeen of them. The list of those receiving the newsletter increased with additions of new readers, and with every newsletter I got back responses commenting on what I had written, often asking for prayers for particular persons or situations.
One of the first newsletters dealt primarily with the practical description of what life looked like for me now. February 29 seemed like a good day for sending out a newsletter, a day that ought to be used to its full extent since we only get a February 29 once every four years. In that newsletter I wrote about the meditation practice that I had set out to engage in.
The process of meditation practice that I was following fit for me; it was a path of devotion, expressing my love for Jesus that came out of my experience of him throughout my life. To offer this devotion I sought through meditation the dissolution of all boundaries between my heart and the Heart of Christ. Meditation practice provides this effect of dissolution, dissolving, melting, something I have seen as a long term effect noticeable by looking back and seeing that there has indeed been a change. Since I started meditating I could cite examples of this dissolving process in such things as letting go of various positions and opinions and judgments about how I think the world operates or ought to be. I have seen the gradual fading away of some bad habits of habitual sin and desires for things I didn’t have but thought I wanted. Before I had struggled to rid myself of them, but now they seem to have lost their hold on me without my effort, their power to keep my attention dissipated, my interest--conscious or unconscious--in sustaining them having faded away.
Now I was looking at the next level of dissolving away what has been a boundary between my heart and Christ's Heart. It was to come down ultimately to the dissolving of my own ideas about myself, my own imagining of who I am, who I think I am, so much of which is self deceptive. When I began, I saw this as a process of "dying" to self. This is a process of becoming aware that who I am is not my body or my mind or my emotions or all of those together. In the beginning when I sat with who I am at that point of the attention of my awareness, I got in touch with a sense of an expansive compassion that was present, a loving acceptance of myself as I was. Meditation was the way I was able to awaken more to this awareness. But this was only an intermediate phase, and my practice continued to unfold and evolve and flow as I faithfully kept to this discipline and continued to place my trust in Christ.
Maintaining the discipline of a daily routine was important for the meditation process. I shared with my readers what this looked like. A typical day for me this: rise somewhere between 4:30 and 5:00 AM, shower, and dress. Often I would wake with the meditational prayer that I was currently engaging in practice echoing in my heart. I would listen to about a half an hour of news on NPR while dressing, offering up the news items in intercession. Then I would sit down to offer prayers of intercession for all the prayer requests and prayer cycles that I had committed to. I would remember names and situations and people's needs before God, offering these names as the intention of the day's meditation practice. Then I meditated for two hours, sitting cross legged in a posture which enables me to keep my back straight to support being alert and aware. This posture--the full lotus pose or a half or modified lotus pose--actually became more and more comfortable, and whenever I moved into this posture my whole body took it as a cue to start meditating, so that I was being enabled to move more quickly into the attitude of meditation. The lotus pose seems for me to offer excellent support for the spine and for ease in breathing. I noticed that an old sciatic nerve problem I had endured since pregnancy with my second child cleared up and disappeared. The abdominal muscles were also strengthened, without the need for calisthenics! And, most interestedly, I felt a greater sense of refreshing energy moving up and down in the body while in this position. For longer and longer periods of time I could sit comfortably in this position and rise from a meditation sitting feeling relaxed, refreshed and energized.
Next I would grab some breakfast and come back to pray Morning Prayer by myself in my cell, with the main emphasis on the reading of the daily office lessons in Hebrew and Greek. For me this is a delight, because the texts are so fresh and immediate in their original languages, with all the richness of the full meanings of the words, and not some translator's choice of meanings given over into English. After some months I began finding places where none of the translations seemed adequate for giving the sense of the word or phrase or sentence. With growing familiarity with the languages, I could see for myself that all of our translations are biased on the basis of our preconceived theology. And in many places that bias gets in the way of and can actually mute the impact of original words. The farther along I got in this daily discipline, the more this became apparent, and the deeper I have come to appreciate the need for the community of faith to spend time together in study of scripture.
Following Morning Prayer, that was becoming more and more a mere liturgical shell for the purpose of scripture study, I would then sit for another two-hour meditation session. Keeping this time for silence uninterrupted was essential for the practice. The phone would be unplugged to save me from the temptation to answer it if it rang, a temptation I used to succumb to in the past, as I had been so habituated to responding to that stimulus, like a Pavlovian dog.
The mid-day dinner hour at the convent was shared with the sisters that live there, the sisters who work in the Provincial Office, and various guests. There was always some interesting conversation arising out of the varied backgrounds of these women, wonderful ministries they have had, and their spiritual interests. Over the course of time some much valued friendships developed. I always wondered what they thought of me at first. Here was an Episcopal priest, a woman, showing up to live with them, a community of Roman Catholic nuns. I entered their lives with little introduction nor any official way of being incorporated into their community, a long-term guest, independent of their life style, yet sharing in it. It must have been as confusing or perplexing for them as it was awkward and tentative for me at the first. But their dedication to hospitality and their well-cultivated loving hearts accepted me freely, and I made myself at home. I remember with particular satisfaction one occasion after I had been there a few of months. I had been away for a couple of days and upon returning one of the sisters said to me simply, “Welcome home.”
After the noon dinner I would check my mail and email, take care of bits of business and correspondence, do some journal writing, and take a walk. The daily walk was an important part of the routine. This was the main exercise I would get, so I was out there every day rain or shine. I have come to have a particularly fond appreciation for walking in the rain with all its variations that we experience in the Seattle area and the freshness and invigoration that it can give to a walk. The grounds at the convent enabled me to cover about a mile without even leaving the place. There was a loop path through the woods, and paths that lead down the hill to the lake with an ample expanse of shoreline on the convent grounds. Most of the trees were tall, mature evergreens--firs and cedars and some pine--with a variety of deciduous such as chestnut and maples. There were azaleas, rhododendrons, and roses, and a wonderful variety of flowers in pots and flowerbeds for spring and summer and into fall. The eleven or so acres sheltered a variety of wildlife--raccoons, squirrels, moles, and for awhile a rabbit that sort of belonged to a neighbor from whom it would regularly escape. There were birds of many varieties--robins, sparrows, blue jays, juncos, morning doves, hummingbirds, flickers, woodpeckers, chickadees, finches, towhees, various ducks, seagulls and waterfowl, including Canadian geese and an occasional heron, every once in a while a hawk, the ubiquitous crows fulfilling the role of the neighborhood bullies, and the eagle family whose squeaky cry would always turn heads to strain for an eagle sighting.
With all this richness of nature, the convent grounds held a resemblance to a nature preserve, a bit of almost old growth forest just blocks from downtown Bellevue. One can smell the trees and the oxygen rich air and feel the body relax in joyous appreciation of this environment. Anxiety and stress melt away. My walks would be spent in focused mindfulness about the immediate present, using my meditation prayer in time with the footsteps. Often I would return from these walks with the cobwebs cleared out of the brains, a healthy warmth to the body and a deep sense of appreciation for the infinite creativity of the Mind of the Creator. These walks were often experiences of devotion, ritual liturgies of adoration, and I eagerly absorbed their healing effect. I soon felt healthier than I had ever been.
After such a walk I would then settle in for another two hours of meditation before supper. With these six hours of meditation a physical manifestation that I found was that my senses were becoming heightened. The sense of hearing seemed to become more acute. The silence was delicious, and so the intrusion of loud noises, such as machinery, traffic or airplanes, often became unbearable, and I would resort to earplugs. Then I started becoming aware of more subtle sounds, such as the various combinations of sounds that occurred when a car drove by. The sound could be divided up into the sound of the engine, the sound of the tires on the road and the sound of the air being pushed aside. I started hearing musical tones embedded in common sounds, the pitch of vibration of different machines and everything from doors opening and closing to the wind blowing around the edge of the building. Then I began hearing whole cords of musical tones, especially at night when it was much quieter, sounds that seemed far away, as though they were echoes, cords with overtones, sometimes as long sustained cords, other times as undulations between different tones, or even arpeggios of rising notes. I asked my teacher about this, and his suggestion was that this was not an uncommon occurrence for those putting in this much time at meditation, a kind of “celestial hearing” that, although it sounded far away, actually was from within me.
This matched with my awareness of internal body sounds and sensations. I listened to the heart beating, the subtle sound of air moving in and out through the nostrils, throat and lungs, the subterranean gurgling of the lower regions, and the electrical buzzing of the nerves and brain. Then I started coming to sense other rhythms in the body beyond the most obvious gross rhythms of breath and heartbeat. There is another pulse that seems to be a flow of energy pulsating at a rate somewhere between the rate for heartbeat and rate for breath often felt in the hands. There are the sensations of energy at various points in a vertical column running parallel with the spine and head. Although I would not say this column coincided with the spine, it did follow some sort of central axis that began from the point where the body touched the meditation mat up to the top of the head or a space just above the top of the head. The traditional seven centers of focus could easily be discerned: base of spine, lower abdomen, solar plexus region, heart, throat, forehead and top of head. Other more subtle points of energy focus later became discernable. I found I could bring my attention to any of these places or become aware when there was energy or discomfort in any one place.
The sense of smell also became heightened. In fact, in one rather strange case for several months all I could smell was cigarette smoke. For awhile it became so annoying that I thoroughly cleaned my cell, got rid of the carpet, scrubbed clean all the little metal plates in the radiator, dusted out all the spaces between the bricks in the wall, and tried incense and air fresheners to put an end to this smell--all to no avail. Then it cleared up on its own after I finally gave up and was willing to just live with it. What did that mean? Who knows? I can speculate. My teacher again suggested that this sort of olfactory response was not uncommon with such a meditation regime. Just as the eyes had become more acute in their seeing of colors, so the nose had become more acute. But why the cigarette smoke, especially when I seemed to be the only one smelling it? There is no satisfactory answer, only speculation. My theory, which is really neither here nor there in terms of significance, is that all the meditation practice was displacing the mental activity I had previously been engaged in during the course of normal work and activities. The mind was being taken back to an earlier stage of life, less mentally sophisticated, less filled up with concepts, ideas, imaginings and musings. It was more like when I was a small child. The smell of the cigarette smoke was very familiar from early childhood when both my parents then smoked. Later they were to quit after my sister and I righteously hounded them about the health dangers. But at that younger age that smell was distinctly present in our home, at my grandparents home, and, as it was the 1950’s, prevalent just about everywhere. Whatever the cause or meaning or lack thereof, the cigarette odor finally subsided to a vaguely dusty-smoky scent that still lingers in the background during meditation, but I could once again take a walk and gratefully smell damp earth, trees and lake smells again.
After a simple supper of soup, salad and fruit the evening was given to praying Evening Prayer, more Greek, reading and writing, and maybe a bit more meditation. I found that this made for a full day; it seemed even busy! The time in meditation was precious and was the first priority. The rest of the daily activity got done around that. I know that this is not everyone's cup of tea, but for me it was like slipping into a comfortable shoe.
The actual meditation practice was first of all simply to sit in silence. There was no agenda for outcome or for how things should flow during the silence, but simply to sit and be with what is--thoughts, emotions, and sensations in the body. Thoughts come, one after another, endlessly, and the practice is to notice them and let them go gently without struggle or force. Jerry, my teacher, had given four rules for this practice. 1. Show up. 2. Pay attention. 3. Tell the truth. 4. Trust the results. These basic rules contain great wisdom. The practice itself is very simple, so simple that our inevitable response is to embellish it and make the meditation more complex. To do that is to obscure the clarity that this simplicity gives and to cloud the process of healing and transformation that meditation provides.
1. Show up. Whatever the meditation practice is that one might engage in, the first thing is to bring yourself to it and do it. Whatever the amount of time set aside in one’s schedule for meditation, preserve that time and be there physically in the same place each day for that time. Whether one feels like it or not, whether the time spent there is wonderful or awful, be there. Meditation does not depend on mental attitude or feelings or the condition of the body. Just be there.
2. Pay attention. The time spent in meditation is not the time for daydreaming, of course. Nor is it the time for problem solving or working out how dialog should have gone in some conversation or for planning or for exploring insights or great ideas. These are all mental activities that take us out of the here and now. Paying attention is looking at what is right before us at the moment. Sitting with eyes closed paying attention might be something like observing the flow of breath, feeling the cushion beneath the body and the fact that one leg is going to sleep, letting go of the sound of the leaf blower in the background for the subtle sounds of the body. Paying attention is a lot of noticing that one has gotten caught up in thoughts passing through the field of attention, noticing that attention has drifted to following particular thoughts and playing them out. At the moment of awareness that one has slipped into thoughts, you will observe that the thought then ceases, and, for the moment at least, attention is back to just what is in front of you.
3. Tell the truth. The mind will want to editorialize on everything that is observed in the field of awareness. There is a constant critique that is going on, but this rule says not to judge what is observed. There is no right or wrong as to what is permissible to come up during meditation, and so the most helpful thing we can do to cooperate with the process of healing and transformation that meditation affords is to speak the honest truth about what we observe. This can lead to discovery of truths about ourselves that up to now we have managed to successfully mask and hide from our conscious consideration, what we have been in denial about ourselves. This also can help us release our strongly held habit of defining how things ought to be, our own created gestalts for explaining the world, so that reality can break through our self-deception and illusion. We can tell the truth about what we experience in the meditation sitting without understanding what it means. Letting go of meaning, what we think something should mean, facilitates seeing the truth.
4. Trust the results. Meditation is a faith practice. When we sit in silence with our eyes closed we have to trust that this is not just an empty waste of time, void of productivity or meaning. We are expressing faith in the One who both is beyond all our experience and knowing, and who is also intimately close to us like the most subtle of whispers, yet instantly known and recognized. Our trust is that whatever occurs during meditation is fine, perfect, in fact, and contributes to our overall healing and transformation. Faith is essentially trust, an act of surrender as we suspend our own notion of control and meaning for the unknown. My experience has been that God not only honors the time given to meditation, but a great abundance of love, mercy, peace, grace, joy and all goodness flows out continually to us, and when I meditate I am opening my attention and awareness in receptivity to all this. Never am I invited into this time of devotional attention to my hurt, but always to my good.
Thus the meditation practice was engaged and began to unfold during this time of sabbatical. I was to continue this schedule and routine for the next fifteen months, only reluctantly pulling back in the number of hours per day spent in meditation when the vision of the Prayer of the Lamb came into focus and necessitated my coming out of this routine into more active ministry. But for this time this was a particularly precious expanse of months, rich and full, and if allowed I would go right back to it. At the very least, several weeks each year need to be spent this way to support the ministry of spiritual leadership. Perhaps the time will come again in the future for such a privileged full time employment.
Chapter 5
Holy Waste and Self Offering
All four Gospels have a story about a woman anointing Jesus. In two of the accounts she anoints his head, and in the other two she anoints his feet. In all four Gospels she uses an ointment described as expensive, and in two accounts as spikenard. John's Gospel gives the worth of this perfumed ointment or oil as being equivalent to a whole year's income for the average wage earner--an incredible extravagance. So there is murmuring among the others present in the scene, a reaction: why this waste?! Think of how many good deeds could have been done, how much social action could have been undertaken, how many acts of ministry could have been performed, how many others in real need could have been ministered to.
But Jesus comes to her defense. "You will always have opportunity for ministry to those in every kind of need. But this is a different situation, a critical time." Indeed it was, for Jesus was approaching the cross. In Mark’s Gospel he says, "Wherever the Gospel is preached in the whole world, this story will be told of her."
In John's account the woman is identified as Mary of Bethany, Martha's sister. Their brother Lazarus has been restored to life. Mary's action is one of gratitude, beautiful devotion, and love; it is something she has to do, has to express, and she isn't put off by economic considerations or pragmatic ideas about very worthwhile ministries. In her priorities Jesus comes first.
Mary, who sat at Jesus' feet when she should have been in the kitchen, has been a figure in Scripture that has always held my attention. Jesus told Martha that her sister had chosen the good part. But too often in our expounding upon this story and in how we preach it, there is a back peddling away from what Jesus said. Martha and Mary, we say, represent dual aspects of the Christian life: the active ministry and quiet contemplation, prayer and action, both needed in living out our discipleship in Christ. Let's keep them balanced. Of course we all need to take time to sit at Jesus' feet periodically, but "faith without works is dead."
There is another way to look at this passage from Luke 10 that I humbly suggest. Mary chose the good part. This is the correct translation. Mary was sitting right at the feet of Jesus, a front row seat, to hear the word from the Word. Martha was distracted with “many tasks,” distracted from listening to the Word. She was running around seeing to hospitality needs for all those guests in her home, doing what was good and right, so she was only able to listen to Jesus with one ear in passing. I picture Martha and Mary and Lazarus inviting Jesus to their home so that they can have a personal opportunity to visit with him as well as ministering to him with their hospitality. But with Jesus came his disciples and how many others in their traveling company. And how many of the neighbors and locals had heard about who was going to be guest at the home of Lazarus and sisters? The affair may have gotten out of hand.
Sure, Lazarus could sit there with Jesus and listen to his teaching. The men in that culture and time had that prerogative. But Mary had abandoned her place of serving in order to give her full attention to Jesus. I think Martha saw Mary doing what she herself wanted to do, but Martha was “doing the right thing,” doing what was expected of her. Martha wanted to be able to sit down and listen too, like her sister who had left all the serving to her. Resentment giving an edge to her words, Martha appealed to the obvious authority that Jesus had for him to tell her sister to return to the proper place of service and ministry, of serving.
But in this situation, to serve while everyone else is sitting and listening is to have a divided attention. You really can’t give your full attention to the listening. It is trying to do some task while listening to someone talk to you. If that someone is your children, they usually call you on it. They want your undivided attention, and they aren’t hesitant to tell you so.
Jesus responds by pointing out to Martha her own divided attention. “You are anxious about many things,” he says. The Greek word for “anxious” means literally to have a divided mind. “Of few things is there a need, or just one,” he continues. “Mary has chosen the good part,” the single focus, not the divided mind of serving AND trying to catch bits of the words Jesus is speaking.
Martha is to learn from Mary about the one thing necessary. Service flows from sitting and listening first, from the relationship with Jesus that results in the realization and deep knowing of our identity through baptism in Christ. True diakonia, true serving can only come out of first realizing on a very deep level our relationship to Jesus, and then service and ministry will flow and be unstoppable.
Mary had chosen the good part, and it wasn't going to be taken from her. And so in John 12 Mary ministers to Jesus with her best offerings. I identified with Mary of Bethany in what she offered to our Lord in anointing his feet and wiping them off with her hair, that totally unnecessary, extravagant, wasteful act of love and devotion. That is what I had been yearning to do also--to minister my devotion to Jesus in a similar way by taking off time from an active ministry which was making a difference, and instead to sit at Jesus' feet.
And also more than that, I yearned to go further--to express my love and devotion in extravagant waste. Sacrifice a year or two year's worth of wages, and pour that on Jesus' feet--with my hair, lying there at his feet also. The act of cutting off my hair, of shaving my head, became for me an expression of devotion.
This took place on a Sunday evening at a Eucharistic liturgy of initiation and commitment. I was marking a break with the past and the new beginning that meditation practice had brought to my whole faith. Surrounded by my support group from the meditation community I belonged to, my spiritual director/teacher, a bishop who was also an old friend and a few others I gave witness to the love of Jesus which had so marked my life and to which I wanted to respond with my own expression of love and devotion.
I spoke about the times of commitment and promises and vows in my life: at baptism at barely two months of age; at confirmation where I could speak for myself the promises made for me at baptism; when I made my life profession in the Third Order, Society of St. Francis; and the vows of ordination. As well as giving testimony to my love and devotion for Jesus, I made a pledge, a vow, that I would give myself as fully as possible to a single focus of devotion through my openness to Christ in this meditation process. Meditation is now my full time occupation.
The act of cutting off the hair was a sacramental form of action, a way I could mark this commitment and promise, an act that calls to mind the Nazarite vows of Scripture. It was a new beginning made with the intention of not cutting the hair again until the pledge had been completed.
Then I had to live on the other side of this act with the consequences. I was given the opportunity to explore all the reactions and outcomes of this radical action. Not entirely comfortable, it was nevertheless a wonderfully full time of insight and discovery. In particular I had to deal with people's reactions and assumptions about what I did. It was a confrontation for some, a puzzlement for others, and some thought I was trying to give up something for Christ. Some thought I was copying a Buddhist ritual or the monastic tonsure, but this was not the rationale, nor what I had in mind. The fact is that this act was not asked of me, not required, not even necessary, but it was something my inner being felt called to do and rejoiced in.
I certainly had to face my own vanity and self-consciousness about my appearance. And in that sense over the long term this was very good. I simply had to get over having concern about what others thought about how I looked, and in so doing I found a new grace for accepting my own aging process. Gone were the stylish curls from the perm and the extra help with coloring so that I could assume I looked younger. So much more of my face was exposed, and so I felt more open to whatever was in the environment around me. I really think this helped nurture the meditation process. With a naked head and a naked face I entered into a deeper embrace of life, bringing also a naked heart.
And there was a fascinating sensation of freedom about the bareness of my head that in an odd way left me feeling ageless. I also felt as though this were a complete fresh start, a new beginning. And then this was the biggest surprise that happened for me out of all of this: When we had finished with cutting the hair, I ran my hands over my head and had an instant awareness that this was the same way my head was when I was baptized--like the two month old infant with hardly any hair! It had all come full circle--back to the place where my identity in Christ was first marked sacramentally, God's side of the Baptismal Covenant, Jesus’ love for me, the promise of life in its fullness, the Light of Christ in my heart, new beginning.
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