Image
The last two weeks have been a warm whirlwind of activity. Whirlwind because they were booked solid with work projects. Warm because they were spent in South Florida and Hawaii.
No one should complain about spending mid-February in either South Florida or Hawaii. I am one lucky duck. Got to enjoy both Cuban black beans and Filipino senorita pastries only days apart, and the hospitality in both locations was sooo kind and welcoming. But I will say that I often found my thoughts scattered. Despite having written about “Occlumency as a Spiritual Practice” just last month, it’s tough, isn’t it? Not allowing the self-inflicted chaos of our national scene to consume our daily life?
A particular blessing in the middle of last week was reconnecting with Kathleen Norris over coffee in Honolulu. Kathleen and I got to know one another a couple years ago at the Collegeville Institute. I was writing about power and she was writing about the desert mystics of the early church. I had a car. She did not. So, we often went grocery shopping with one another, and sometimes up the (slight) hill to St. John’s Benedictine monastery for Mass or Liturgy of the Hours. The monks pray slowly there. Not like the Dominicans. When you pray with the Dominicans, you pray at a certain clip. There are places to go and people to see. There is a Kingdom of God that needs our urgent attention. But with the Benedictines, there is a long pause at the end of each line of every phrase of every psalm. The glacial pace was driving me a bit mad until I asked Kathleen why she liked going to Liturgy of Hours at the monastery so much. “It is like standing and shouting poetry at each other for hours on end. What could be better than that??” Forever changed my view on the matter.
Kathleen still does not have a car. She took the bus to the coffee shop. I, of course, took an Uber. Somethings have not changed, but being with her was a little reminder once again that urgency and importance are not the same thing. The world does need our attention. God is still trying to do something on this planet. Still trying to fashion a Kingdom marked by love and peace. But love and peace are never brought about amidst frenzy and frazzle. Our every action, indeed our every word, needs to be more intentional, not less. With a pause in between.
On my way home on the plane (Geez, that is a lonnggg flight), I began to reread Romano Guardini’s Meditations Before Mass to get ready for class this Wednesday. The MAPS-CGS cohort at Aquinas Institute has been reading Guardini as their “spiritual companion” for the past semester and it is always a good idea before teaching on a topic to have done the readings yourself, especially if it has been a couple years since you looked at them. I was quite taken by Chapter 4 on “Composure”—a much neglected virtue, at least in my life. Guardini was writing in 1936 Germany, but see if his words do not sound like they were written for us today:
“All things seem to disquiet man. The phenomena of nature intrigue him; they attract and bind. But because they are natural, they have a calming, collecting influence as well. It is much the same with those realities that make up human existence: encounter and destiny, work and pleasure, sickness and accident, life and death. All make their demands on man, crowding him in and overwhelming him; but they also give him earnestness and weight. What is genuinely disastrous is the disorder and artificiality of present-day existence. We are constantly stormed by violent and chaotic impressions. At once powerful and superficial, they are soon exhausted, only to be replaced by others. They are immoderate and disconnected, the one contradicting, disturbing, and obstructing the other…. We are constantly lured from the important and profound to the distracting, interesting, piquant. This state of affairs exists not only around but within us. To a large extent man lives without depth, without a center, in superficiality and chance… He touches everything brought within easy reach of his mind by the constantly increasing means of transportation, information, education, and amusement, but he doesn’t really absorb anything. He contents himself with having ‘heard about it.’”
By way of contrast, Guardini describes “composure”:
“Composure works in the opposite direction, rescuing man’s attention form the sundry objects holding it captive and restoring unity to his spirit. It frees his mind from its many tempting claims and focuses it on one, the all-important. It calls the soul that is dispersed over myriad thoughts and desires, plans and intentions back to itself, re-establishing its depth…. Silence overcomes noise and talk; composure is the victory over distraction and unrest. Silence is the quiet of a person who could be talking; composure is the vital, dynamic unity of an individual who could be divided by his surroundings, tossed to and fro by the myriad happenings of every day.”
(I’d give you a page number for all this, but I am reading from an e-book and no such thing exists. So, if you are interested, all I can say is “Chapter 4.” It is not a long chapter.)
In a roundabout way, slowing down to reflect on my warm whirlwind of the past two weeks led me to prepare this reflection on Mark 10:13-16 for this coming Saturday (March 1). It is about how to still love and welcome the topsy-turvy, energetic nature of the Kingdom of God, while still separating oneself from the topsy-turvy “genuinely disastrous… disorder and artificiality of present-day existence” that Guardini speaks of. May we always be able to tell the difference!