Leisure is not a Luxury

In these days of dislocation, some of us are scrambling to do everything from home - our jobs, our families, our friendships and spiritual communities.  Many feel busier than before!  Others find themselves at a loss, as they are laid off or work commitments are cancelled.  The COVID crisis is laying bare and exacerbating the growing inequality and divisions in our societies.

I am relatively protected from this, but I'm definitely on the "more open" end of the spectrum.  Some retreats have been cancelled, the gym is closed, all sorts of trips are off the table.  I find myself with time to reflect, to write, to listen to music.  I'm rediscovering my early novitiate, when I had few obligations beyond study and prayer.

Recently a friend returned a book I had loaned her, that I had forgotten about.  Leisure, The Basis of Culture, was written by Josef Pieper S.J. seventy years ago.  Pieper distinguishes leisure from idleness and argues that creativity and spiritual growth depend upon it.  Indeed, the root of our word for "school" is the Greek for "leisure."  Leisure allows time for ideas to emerge, for insight to be gained, for challenges to be faced.  Without leisure we become trapped by compulsion and habit, even as we seem to be serving and ministering and even praying.

What a perfect time to return to this book and its lessons!  I felt guilty at first as I did a jigsaw puzzle. Then I found that as I did that I heard hymns and psalms in my head, then thought of people I hadn't talked to in a while, then had ideas for my writing.  I remembered what I used to know - that a puzzle, a walk, are for me part of the creative process.  Now I sit down a bit each day and do the puzzle, and listen to classical music or nothing.

This is not just for our own sake, people.  The world desperately needs people of courage and clarity and peace right now.  The world needs a way forward.  Long ago the monasteries were the holders of culture, of learning of all sorts, when the world around them was collapsing.  Today the monasteries aren't enough.  We each need to, and deserve to, live into what they knew.

If you are a parent working from home and coping with your kids, I don't have great insight.  I can't tell you what to do here.  But I can urge you to make 15 minutes to pray for a creative way forward.  Don't rush it or force a solution.  Leisure is only real if it's not programmed or aimed too sharply.  I am praying for you, in my expanded leisure, and I will pray for you to find some.

If you are alone, unemployed and challenged with bills, I hate to sound like I know what you should do.  I do have a strong opinion (about everything!).  If there's nothing to do, nothing that worrying will help with, sit still for a bit.  Enough cleaning.  Look out the window.  Listen to music.  Read a poem or a novel.  Let your heart teach you something new.  Something will emerge - at least that's my  experience.  I am praying for you too, every day.

We are bound together.  Those who make use of leisure are not opting out of our collective responsibilities, but are taking up the challenge of letting God inspire them and, through them, those around them.  Your leisure, rightly engaged in, will enrich my life.

Don't just do something, stand there!

Get the book:https://www.ignatius.com/Leisure-P1445.aspx

Mary the Apostle

I read this the other day, and wanted to share it.  Some radical new thought?  No.  This is from a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes preached before King James I on Easter Day 1622.

________________

The risen Christ gave Mary Magdalene a commission.  'Go' is her mission, and 'tell my brethren' is her commission.  A commission, to publish the first new of his rising, and as it falls out, of his ascending too.

The Father that by this word she was by Christ made an apostle, nay 'an apostle to the apostles themselves.'  An apostle; for what lacks she?  Sent first, immediately from Christ himself; and what is an apostle but so?  Secondly, sent to declare and make known.  And last, what was she to make known?  Christ's rising and ascending.  And what are they but 'the gospel,' yea the very gospel of the gospel?

This day, with Christ's rising, begins the gospel; not before.  Crucified, dead and buried, no good news, no gospel in themselves.  And them the Jews believe as well as we.  The first gospel of all is the gospel of this day, and the gospel of this day is this Mary Magdalene's gospel, the prime gospel of all, before any of the other four.  That christ is risen and upon his ascending, and she the first that every brought these glad tidings.  At her hands the apostles themselves received it first, and from them we all.

________

We need to keep hearing this.  Mary was known to be an apostle from the beginning, and that knowledge has never been extinguished.  Nothing new, but continually buried and rising again.  The truth.

As Companions of Mary the Apostle, we continue to preach the gospel "by any means necessary."  However, wherever, whenever we can, we announce the good news of new life in Christ.  Please pray for us to fulfill the commission that we too have sensed in our hearts.  Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

God in the Pause

We're into week five of the "pause," and results are beginning to show.  The numbers of new cases, and of deaths, are dropping steadily.  It's still a lot, but it's not like a week ago, not like two weeks ago.  We may have peaked - for now.  I pray over the numbers each day, over the people they report, and the last two days have been days of thanks as well as petition.

I am one of those who has found a blessing in the pause.  Elizabeth and I had each planned three months of sabbatical time later this year, because we needed a real disruption to get off our track of overwork and routine, which had blocked any deeper creativity.  When COVID hit and plans were disrupted it was painful to see dates dropping away.  But now, we're creating that space here.  Our prayer and meal schedule is unchanged, but we've each found some room to relax and let our minds wander each day.

So I'm finally starting to write.  I kept looking for a good time to write each day, and I was constantly interrupted with "urgent" things coming from others.  Now I'm writing 5:30-6:30 most mornings, before Matins.  And sometimes there's time later in the day for more, but sometimes my "writing" takes place over a jigsaw puzzle or during a walk, as ideas and memories come to me.  (And I'm starting to post some things:  https://shanephelanswimming.blogspot.com.)

Now we're beginning to talk about what we want to create after the pause - the shape of our lives, how to maintain the space we're finding.  It will be a challenge, but one of the gifts of community is having others who remind you of your commitments.

Perhaps you have been finding some open space.  How does it feel?  Sometimes I'm still feeling a bit guilty as I sit over the puzzle, but I get over it.  God speaks to me, and I need to make space to listen and hear.  It looks like doing nothing - and it is!  It's letting God do something, equipping me to do what She would have me do.

Are you letting God work during this time?  What is She up to in you and around you?

Seven Stanzas At Easter

Seven Stanzas At Easter

John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body:

if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,

each soft Spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled

eyes of the eleven apostles;

it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart

that - pierced - died, withered, paused, and then

regathered out of enduring Might

new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the 

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not paper-mache,

not a stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow

grinding of time will eclipse for each of us 

the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel,

weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,

opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen

spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are

embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance.

Resurrection in the midst of death

This is Easter 2020:

Yesterday the death toll from COVID-19 passed 10,000 in New York State.  A month ago we had just had our first death.  Our focus was on Italy, with its horrible numbers and reality.  I'm not sure we knew that it would be just as bad here.

It's Easter.  And all around us people are sick, dying, being buried in ways we never thought we'd see outside of wartime.

It's Easter.  On Sunday Ernesto led a service for hundreds at the Beatrice (Nebraska) Speedway, preaching new life out of the old.  Elizabeth preached resurrection to those of us gathered on Zoom.  We found ways to celebrate, to be together, to believe in resurrection.

How do we hold together the pain and the promise of this time?
I'm crying when I see the numbers, while I pray for those souls and those who love them.
I'm smelling flowers and watching the birds and trees and bunnies wake up.
I'm standing in the middle, not balancing, just holding it all.

Well, no.  I'm not holding it.  That's Christ's business.  "He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together . . . For in him all the fullness of God was please to dwell" (Colossians 1:17,19).

All the fullness of God.  Not just the happy parts.  Not just the pain either.  All of it.  All things are reconciled in Christ: death and life, sin and forgiveness.  In Christ, the pain of crucifixion and all the other deaths is held with the promise of new life and of transformation.  Mary's grief becomes shock, and joy, but the trace of grief remains to give texture and depth to the joy.  All the fullness of God.

On Sunday Ernesto talked about the empty churches as "empty tombs."  He reminded us that Christ is alive, is here among us wherever we gather.  Christ comes into the tombs of our hearts as well.  Mary stood weeping, and couldn't even recognize Jesus in her grief.  And then he called her name.

May you, this day, hear your name.  May you know the possibility of new life in the midst of whatever grief and fear you face today.  May you go and tell others who need to know.  All things hold together, as we hold together.  We are the body of Christ.

Unconditional Love

Today, Thursday, marks the beginning of the three great days.  During these days we will travel from the upper room to the garden, to the prison, to the cross and grave and another garden.  Soon we will be back in the upper room, experiencing Christ in a new way.  Tonight we begin in the upper room.

These three days are packed with meaning.  We all will focus on different meanings, and all will be part of the great story.  For me, these days are about God's crazy love for us, and our response.

Tonight Jesus will share his body and blood with his friends.  They won't understand, I expect, although the Gospels don't record anyone asking, "Lord, what are you talking about?" or refusing to eat or drink.  But they will balk at that other sign of love, the foot-washing.  I suspect the eating they can overlook, as the bread and wine look like and taste like bread and wine.  But there's no mistaking the foot-washing for anything other than physical touch, the humblest service.  Peter balks, and I bet he's not the only one.  He's the one we hear about.

Martin Smith writes that many of his retreatants identify with Peter, and my own experience is similar.  In many churches most people will not come forward to have their feet washed.  Even some who will wash others will not allow others to wash them.  It's just too humbling to receive that touch.  Perhaps some people are relieved that this year they don't have to decide!

This resistance to being loved and served by Jesus shows up in so many places in my life, and I dare say in others'.  I remember as a young adult feeling sorry for those who "needed" to believe in God.  You may need a crutch, that's OK, but I'm stronger than that.  It took years for me to get strong enough to let myself need that love.  I couldn't trust anyone's love, even those I loved, so I refused to need it.  I lived half a life.

Later I did come to know God, and to rely on that Power, and my life grew.  But I drew a line between "spirituality" and "religion," especially Christianity.  I was not going to talk to or about Jesus.  My God was still pretty vague and generic.

I still remember the day when I let Jesus love me.  I prayed to God already, I had a relationship of trust, but I still hadn't let this love come to me.  But one beautiful California day, in March 2000, I was sprung open.  And everything changed.  Who knew there was so much joy in the world?

Tonight, and these days, let Jesus love you.  He's going to do it whether you consent or not.  The question is whether you let yourself experience it.  Let it happen.

If you're alone tonight, wash your feet and imagine - experience - Jesus washing them.  If you live with others, invite them to join you in washing one another.  Wet or dry, let yourself be bathed in love tonight, and through these days.  Jesus is going to go much further in love than washing your feet!  He is going to give himself totally. When we respond in kind, joy and love will spread - exponentially.

God be with you, today and always.

Holy Week!

Last Supper by David LaChappelle

Holy Week is often a time of many different emotions and thoughts for me.  I go from wonder at the love Jesus shared and inspired, to horror and grief, to -

I try not to get ahead of the story this week.  I don't always get to joy exactly on schedule.  I don't want to plow through this week of intense intimacy with Jesus.  As a Companion of Mary Magdalene, I treasure this week of walking with her as she walks with Jesus.  It's a time of deep reflection and prayer.

And, this year, of work.  Elizabeth and I had planned to do a very quiet, private Holy Week this year: all the services, but just the two of us and whatever local friends might want to join.  Then COVID hit.  As we learned of people's yearning to be together, our hearts matched that yearning.  We are used to meeting on Zoom, so we thought: let's invite some of our friends to join us.  Simple, right?

We've spent the last week consumed with creating a meaningful service that everyone could not only view but participate in.  With Diane Paulsell, one of our Covenant Companions, and Allison Moore, the new priest at St. Andrew's in New Paltz, we're putting on the full Triduum - from foot washing to new fire.  No communion, honoring our inability to be physically together, but we will be spiritually and really united.  So: readings, liturgies, Zoom instructions, have been pouring into the computer.  Emails, phone calls, rehearsals.  Suddenly we're hosting a church service!

So: how to honor the need to be in the story myself, to pray and meditate, while also working full out to enable our community to share the story?  This is the dilemma, not only of those who lead or serve churches, but of everyone who has a job and a family and also wants to be mindful.  So I don't have an answer; I just have a sense of solidarity.

As every year, I'm reminded that the first Holy Week was like that for the women who served Jesus and his companions, and probably for that company as well.  They weren't all sitting around feeling deep feelings.  They felt a lot, I'm sure, but they also kept cooking.  Like them, we don't take a break from "the world" this week unless we go on retreat and let others bear that burden for us.  Most of the time, all we can do is remember Jesus and pray without ceasing.

Everything I do this week,I offer to you, Jesus.  Please work through me, through us, and give me the awareness of your presence and your love.  Help me keep my heart fixed on you even as I plow through emails and plans.  Help us all to remain with you in this time when you pour yourself out for us.  Show me how to live, and eventually to die, in love.