DARTON - LONGMAN + TODD, 2006

Childhood

This morning at Vigils (the feast of the Holy Innocents, December 28) we read a homily from John Henry Newman where he was speaking about the nature of childhood innocence and the process whereby we lose it. At one point he spoke of "what we once were" (i.e. children) as an intimation of what God will make us in the kingdom of heaven.
This is an amazing thought, bigger than it seems on first impac1. I am accustomed to think of time passing as time in which I should be growing toward what I will be, and there is some clear sense in which this is true. But Newman gets at another level of the question here. His suggestion helps me to intuit, to detect in me, a someone I once already was as a part of what I am becoming. Even if I never was that someone completely, I have already touched it, already been that. It is - I catch a glimpse in flashes - being that person that God would have intended me to be before the fall, his idea of me before the history of sin begins to kick in and have its actual effects on my life.
I think of Joe T. and Keenan E., two seven-year-old boys, so excited and pure as I helped them prepare for their first communion. I was standing at the altar with them and explaining different things about the Mass, boldly telling them deep things which adults would have understood with difficulty. Suddenly Joe shuddered and exclaimed, "How do you know these things?" Then I think of John N., 16, who used to have that same innocence but is now losing it. He recently told me, sullen and accepting, "It used to be that God was always there, that I felt his presence always. Then one day it all went away." That is what often happens. But why is that? Why?

City and Country

Today, in the monastic choir, singing along in one of the psalms about Jerusalem being restored, there flashed through my mind a strong visual image of the actual city as it is today. With Father Konrad, who loves Jerusalem so much and lived there for a number of years, singing next to me in the choir, I thought what a privilege it is to live today in some great city - Jerusalem, Rome, Barcelona, New York, San Francisco which has exerted and continues to exert some strong influence on history and culture. To live in such a city, even as just one of millions, is to be a part of something grand.
Then I wondered if I am living anything less grand out here in the country where I am. And I think not. Yet there is probably no need to contrast country with city and to imagine one as better than the other. Today I am letting the life of the city - how glorious it is to be a part of it - be a guide for me in discovering something important, something historical and cultural, about being a citizen of a particular piece of country. It is perhaps less obvious, but there is a grandeur waiting to be discovered in my living in this portion of the valley in this particular season of the year, a grandeur comparable in scope and in importance to the grandeur of being a part of Jerusalem or Rome or one of the other great cities. Jerusalem can be a guide - indeed, God so intended it - to living in any city on earth and in any piece of country. I have sung of this often (out here in the country) in another psalm: "Of Zion they shall say, 'One and all were born in her.' People shall be enrolled saying, 'This one was born in her.' All shall sing and dance saying, 'All my origins are in you.''' (Ps. 87:5-7)

Clumsy

All my longing, all my restlessness, my worry, my sense of failure perhaps all this is just my clumsiness at finding myself in contact with the divine and eternal realities in which I am immersed. I mean God. I am immersed in God through the finite forms he has created and placed among us as means for touching his infinite form. Of course, one is all mixed up at first.

Connections

Passing full and near perfect days in an Oregon summer has the strange effect of etching more clearly in my memory and mind certain scenes from Europe. I am in the valley, not even at the coast, but somehow now I have a splendid set of visual memories of walks along the shore of the Adriatic in a festive explosion of a unique quality of light, and then I remember drives from there in the country hills with the setting sun, the paesaggio beyond. Or I am thinking of scenes of Barcelona, its long and noble streets, its abundance of trees, cooling us in the summer heat and the late nights. Or the neighborhood of Prati in Rome on a hot summer evening on my way to Louis and Kate's house. There is a place in the orchard here that makes me think of Poland: not of an orchard in Poland but of a street in Krakow. I don't get the connection, but in the orchard I think about this street. I also remember terraced banks of olive trees outside Florence many years ago at the house of Donatella, my Italian teacher. Or Mount Saint Victoire in Provence during a summer there and pictures by Cézanne. One world. My one life. Mysterious waiting-to-be-understood connections.

Contemporaries

We think of our families and relatives. We think of our nation or race. We regard the geographical unit in which we live. We identify with others of our faith. In all these ways we find the bonds that establish us in relation to others. Not everyone is included. We need a set of relations. We cannot be connected evenly to one and all. But there is another kinship that we tend perhaps too much to overlook. I mean the tie with my contemporaries: all the people who are alive now while I am alive, and this across different countries and any culture. Reflecting on this, I find a kinship strangely strong. The thought inspires a tenderness in me for all others who are alive now in this same period of human time in which I too have appeared. It reveals a potential relationship and bond with anyone at all who is alive while I am, from whatever land or whatever culture. No matter the differences in personal cultures or personal stories, there will always be this wonderful possibility of real meeting and real kinship simply in virtue of our being alive at the same time. Everybody else is on a schedule different from mine, but our times overlap. Older people are still alive and can relate to me, their junior. And I am able to meet any of those who got started after me, and we can have real points of contact. The world moves along in this way. The web is immense. My contemporaries, my relatives! We move together for a brief while through the span of life that is given us.

Continuity

There is, of course, a continuity in my life from who I was as a child to the man I now am. There is an explanation for how and why I am who I am. But I have lost the thread. I forget how I got here. What would happen if I should remember, should recover the thread?

Creation

The whole created world is already God's open and gracious communication of himself. One needn't go elsewhere or leave it behind in order to meet him. Our (inevitable) encounter with created realities is already our encounter with God. If after that God wishes also to communicate even more of himself somehow, then, of course, it is his choice as to how. In fact, what we see in Jesus is that God, using his creation as a foundation through which he continues to communicate, also does even more. The becoming flesh of the Eternal Word is the model and pattern of his continually unfolding choice: God himself immediately present in his mediating creation. Recapitulating everything in heaven and on earth in Christ. Man gives voice to voiceless creation, but the Incarnate Word gives voice to voiceless man.

Cross

I was praying before the painted cross in the abbot primate's chapel. It is hundreds of years old, going back to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. It is beautiful. The dead body of Christ is so giving, filled with light, and surrounded by angels. I thought of it hanging somewhere, looking like that, every day during all those centuries. I thought of all the events of history that have unfolded. And no matter how diverse the materials of history and the continents on which all the various things have happened, this cross was hanging somewhere, absorbing the events and judging them all, suited to every situation. It is art's way of saying what the sacraments also accomplish in their own way: the hour of Jesus' dying is an hour which does not pass away, which draws all things to itself.

Crowds

I was praying after Compline one evening before the Blessed Sacrament and became aware, after about ten minutes, of Father Martin (age 92) rising, cautiously genuflecting and then advancing slowly and quietly down the hall into the cloister of the monastery. It occurred to me that heaven for him - and hopefully also for me - will not be altogether different from that moment adoration, silence, a moving along forward into a great blank of something both familiar and unknown, and he and I being together but focusing on the Lord. What was especially new for me in this insight was noticing that in my thinking about heaven I usually tend to have a sense - only half explicit, but solidly there - of crowds, crowds of angels and saints in a great communion of adoration. But in this moment there was such silence and simplicity and intimacy in my being with the Lord, and I could sense that kind of a moment extending itself right on into heaven with people like Father Martin walking along the side of my consciousness, only thousands more like him. And countless numbers of angels everywhere, and yet still my intimacy with the Lord, or my great emptiness in his presence, or whatever it is.

Cruelty

The cruelty of the world - how old was I when it first began to dawn on me?

Crumbling

The world seems more and more to be crumbling. More people are awaking to the strange mood. Folks are really acting crazy, and there is a vicious spirit abroad in the land. I am feeling so tired of it; and as I try to pray in response, I feel my own weakness and I struggle to hope. For it seems my world of faith and the Church are crumbling too. And my monastery. And the things I do.
From one angle I look at all this with relative dispassion and think through several possible constructs for understanding it. The best-case scenario for my coming to grips with the despair which threatens to overwhelm me personally is that this is simply an invitation to deeper faith and hope. If my way is particularly dark and yet I still push through, then this could be useful to others, a sort of pioneering effort through the new territory of this strange moment in the history of the world. The worst-case scenario is that the wickedness in us all has been somehow unleashed, and the world will finish first in a savage bloodbath and finally in a dirty nuclear holocaust.
With the same dispassion and clarity - it seems a clarity to me, though it may not be - I try to pray. My prayer is either just what is called for or a huge nothing which at least causes no harm. I shall try to persevere in prayer despite the severe temptation to think that it is nothing, that no one is listening. I see no way out of this dilemma because prayer with no one listening may be some mysterious being conformed to the cross of Christ, who, after all, cried out, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" Or it may simply be no one listening. The safest bet is to continue in hope.
It seems impossible to me to imagine or conceive anything greater than the content and claims of Christian faith - obviously not these as poorly represented but as they ready are. These do not seem human in their origin. They are so refined; they are more than human; they are divine. Is their greatness an argument for their truth? If so, why does it not persuade all or even at least more? Living the Christian life is the only argument, the only way forward. I am trying to live from the old truths in this new and changed time.