Ora et Labora

Prayer has never been easy for me. My first recollection of how to pray comes from the print images of apple-cheeked cherubs in very crisp pajamas kneeling beside their beds, saying their bedtime prayers. Okay, so that’s what you do. Even as a small person, it never seemed natural or authentic. A rote recitation of someone else’s words to an authoritarian somebody with whom I would never shake hands. Despite many, many starts, it never lasted.

I don’t recall discussing prayer during confirmation classes. Time was spent on learning the Lutheran ‘codex’: the ten commandments, the apostles’ creed, the Lord’s prayer, the two sacraments and the office of the keys...all through the lens of Martin Luther. Prayer was what Pastor Gastmeier said and we answered, “amen”. And, after confirmation classes ended and adolescence beckoned, prayer was what was done at mealtimes and in church on Sunday. Amen.

Fast forward four decades. Prayer has become a question that is being wrestled with, willingly and happily. So, for now, whenever and wherever I pray, I choose to think about prayer, in that place and time, as it relates to my evolving understanding of prayer.

For example, intercessory prayer has become a vehicle for me to meditate on the needs of those on whose behalf intercessions are being made. I cannot reconcile my understanding of the Trinity with making specific requests on the behalf of others and expecting favourable outcomes from God . What I can understand is holding the needs of those for whom we pray in my head and heart, questioning what my role in the request could be and then giving the request over to the mystery of faith.

Centering prayer has become a twice-daily (in the best of times) pause that stills my mind (in the best of times) as I sit in the silent mystery of faith. It is yet another example of paradox: it is so simple in concept but extremely difficult to master; it is so beneficial but so easy to miss a session; it is as old as time but new to the modern church.

St Augustine said that when we sing, we are praying twice. (Well, I had always thought that Luther had said that first. I was told that by another Lutheran, a long time ago, as an explanation why Lutherans consider themselves “The Singing Church”. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the phrase had been coined at least a thousand years earlier than Luther!) Thus, when I am singing hymns, I try to concentrate on the words carefully and on the way that I am singing, that I sing with ardour (sorry, pew neighbours!). Surprisingly, Sunday’s hymns will echo at the oddest moments, later in the week.

And today; it was my turn to prepare a meal for Carol. Since receiving the call from Marie Jones, I have anticipated what I would prepare while reflecting on Carol and her sister Jane during this important time in both of their lives. My food preparation was a prayer for both of them; labora et ora intertwined.

The thoughts about prayer surfaced as I made my way through the familiar recipe. Blog material, I said knowing that a blog deadline was staring me in the face. When the stew had finally reached its simmer, I took a break and checked our mailbox. In with the bills and admail was my first edition of “The Monastic Way”, a monthly publication with daily reflections by Joan Chittester, a bestselling author, an international lecturer, a leading voice in contemporary spirituality and a Benedictine nun. The cover page had a beautiful photograph of a cathedral window; below it was the following saying: “Never pray in a room without windows”, The Talmud. Hmmm. I open the edition and read the month’s essay: “Pray into the Fullness of Life”. It was one of those moments of synchronicity that catches you and holds you for awhile.

I share her essay with you.

Pray into the Fullness of Life by Joan Chittester, OSB

When I was a young nun, I spent a lot of time watching the older sisters in chapel. When community prayer was over, and the chapel lights went dim, some of them simply settled back in their pew in a kind of comfortable presence. No prayer book in hand, no spiritual reading book in front of them.

Others of them began the round of the Stations of the Cross, their faces barely lit but clearly intense as they moved from one to another of the wall hangings depicting the journey of Jesus to the cross.

A few stayed kneeling, rosaries in hand, the beads flying.

A few of the very eldest climbed the stairs to the gallery, sat in the dark and simply whispered their prayers out loud.

At one period in my life, I thought those prayers were the elementary ones, that the community’s praying of the Divine Office was the “real prayer’. As the years went by and I got more seasoned spiritually, I began to realize that the intensity of those “simple” prayers could only come out of a life lived in God. These were the prayers that led each of them, day after day, however differently, both into the Mind of God and the soul of life. I learned, too, that there is no one right way to pray.

The fact is that prayer is one of the most elusive concepts in the Christian lexicon.

Prayer has styles and stages, formats and prayer forms, both official and unofficial. It has been a problem-and a solution for eons. Prayer is both natural- “Oh, dear God, please help me!” and formal –“First joyful mystery: The Annunciation.” People who pray all the time often say they don’t know how to pray. And people who never pray formally, often say that they feel like they are praying all the time. So what do we make of all of this?

Formal prayers-Church prayers-carry the theology of the church about who God is. They teach us what the sacraments are about and what we seek to be in life as a community in search of the Living God.

Personal prayer, on the other hand, is about our own struggles and questions and doubts and spiritual maturation as we go through life.

But underneath it all is the real concern and purpose of prayer: The question is not whether or not God is with us; the concern is whether or not we are really with God. Aware of God. Open to God’s action in our life. Alert to the presence of God in this moment, whatever its nature, however it feels.

A personal prayer life has many styles. Some people say one rosary after another. Others join prayer groups. Some go to monasteries and pray the hours with the monastics there. For some, daily Mass is the core of their spiritual life. Many others spend hours a day and years of their life sitting in deep, Centering Prayer, emptied of all forms whatsoever, simply alive to the voice of God within.

After years of studying prayer and prayer forms, official and unofficial, what I saw in the lives of elderly sisters, I began to see as the great secret of prayer: and at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter which of these styles we practice. None of them are “better” in the qualitative sense than any other. It all depends on which prayer style best fits our own personal style of life and thought and personality and sense of union with God on earth.

The only thing that really counts is a regular, unending, intense, centred relation with God, here and now, which shapes our lives and converts our hearts to good, to the world, to being the hands and hearts of the God who made us so that we would continue what creation began.

Amen.

The Web Scribe

The Geology of Relationship

This past Sunday’s homily took me back to second year at Western – and my ensuing love affair with (to understate it) that most esoteric of topics, plate tectonics. Then, as now, students were in need of ancillary classes (aka ‘bird courses’) to flesh out their schedule and to complete requirements for graduation. The task, of course, was to find a class or two that required little (read, ‘no’) work, little (read, ‘as little as possible’) attendance, and certainly no additional reading – essentially padding one’s transcript and leaving room for ‘applying’ oneself to the more important issues (whatever they might be!). Little did I know that Geophysics 21 would provide me with perhaps the most interesting eight months of academics I would encounter in my rather protracted career in same – and the most enduring metaphor for relationship I have yet to unearth (as it were).

To expand slightly on Lorne’s imagery, the globe’s surface is not the static, predictable shell that we would hope. It’s a dynamic, shifting, decidedly mobile, and unpredictable collection of ‘plates’ rather more like a suit of armour than an immobile crust encasing our planet. These float over (and under) each other – and occasionally getting ‘stuck’ on each other, to the extent that they grind and grate, one against the other (starting to sound like relationship), eventually freeing themselves – often with catastrophic results – to carry on their journey. In the geophysical world, it’s called an earthquake; in the realm of relationship, it’s called a fight or a riot or . . . a war.

Nicola and I were fortunate enough to take in a performance of Palmer Park last weekend at the Studio Theatre. Our fourth play in eight nights, it had to be good to keep our attention. (Fortunately we’d seen Cabaret when we were better rested because, well . . . it didn’t!) As some of you may know, Park explores the failed efforts of four, racially mixed couples to cultivate ‘sustainable integration’ in a well-to-do, inner city neighbourhood in late 1960’s Detroit, immediately following the race riots in that city. As compelling as the acting and writing of this piece may have been, its lens was a little too close to the action, singling out race as the ‘active ingredient’. Rather like blaming San Franciscans for being the cause of their earthquakes.

The production frames itself as a ‘requiem’, lamenting the short-term failure of such attempts – and making its shop-worn pleas to deal with prejudice. In fact, what the play illustrates most clearly (evidently without intending it) is the result of juxtaposing two very powerful forces, in extremely close proximity, and moving in opposite directions: be these forces of race, or class (as was more centrally the case in this production), or religion. Again what is most eloquently (and I fear, accidentally) portrayed is the precariousness of living on a ‘fault line’; and the arrogance that we may, by force of will or good intention, ‘overcome’ these natural elements.

Back to those pesky plates! As with our global geology, an essential problem in a relationship that has begun to feel adversarial and/or oppositional is not that we are standing toe to toe, locked in an impasse – although it certainly feels that way when we are in strong disagreement with someone or -ones. But rather that our natural movement, our right to ‘flow’ in the direction we have chosen has been not so much blocked but ‘lodged’, stuck on someone else’s bias or belief system or need set. To the principles it all feels the same: stuck or nose to nose, what’s the difference?

As it turns out, a lot. As long as the confrontation is framed as a standoff or gridlock, nothing changes. The only ‘solution’ is what is commonly referred to as a win-lose – one having to give way, to capitulate so the other can have his, her, or their way. Lovely prescription for resentment. And that old saw, compromise, doesn’t really leave a much better taste. Turns out people are, in every sense of the words, creatures of habit; the only thing that feels OK is to be allowed to continue with their personal flow and anything short of same is, well, a compromise. The tendency in these situations then is to foster ‘black and white’, ‘all or none’, ‘my way or the highway’ solutions. In the case of one’s affiliation with a church that translates too often into an ‘in or out’ decision.

A central theme of Lorne’s homily was that of cultivating our relationship with God – and the impediments (‘mountains’) that may subvert or block this connection from growing or perhaps even forming at all. Framed slightly differently, I expect many of us (if I may presume) are ‘stuck’ on some aspects of formal expressions of faith, commitment; even relevance and credibility. Flipping through the BCP in a ‘reflective’ (read, distracted) moment, I stumbled on the XXXIX Articles of Religion nestled quietly between the Original Prefaces and the Creed of St. Athanasius (not a household name as far as I know); page 698, if interested. I began to scan these frankly rigid, arcane, and polarized ‘declarations of belief’ and realized, with something of a start, that I don’t really believe (nor can I even remotely come close to accepting) many, if any of these ‘position statements’.

So what’s a body to do? Increasingly, I fear, the answer, simplistic, maybe impulsive, always without nuance or consideration, is to leave the building. Sounds a lot like moving out of the neighbourhood when that first black (or white or yellow) family moves in. Perhaps it’s time to take a lesson from something a wee bit older than organized religion: again, those persistent plates – here since the dawn of time (literally) and somehow continuing to coexist, reshaping the topography of our earth, relentless, patient, enduring. Reframing the concern – accept and recite, or be gone – as one of restoring ‘freedom of movement’ within a congregation then becomes a task of addressing the particular belief structures of (despite the fact that we’re all Anglicans) a quite heterogeneous population of parishioners; accommodating the diversity that spans the gamut from conservative literalist to metaphoric liberal. A tall order to be sure. But one that invites the restoration of ‘flow’ – in whatever direction that may take the individual, within the greater context of a church, a world.

David Howard

What is the Purpose of Life?

Elora Festival Sermon

Dr. Jay Baker

July 27, 2008


Where else in southern Ontario or in all Christendom for that matter would you have to arrive at church half an hour early in the middle of July to be assured of a seat. Such is part of the miracle that is Elora. I want to thank the rector for asking me back to preach a second sermon from this pulpit and I issue the same disclaimer I did on the first occasion. Being a family physician for 32 years, a coroner, and a chorister provide absolutely no credentials for preaching, and while being Chair of the Elora Festival and Singers has certainly increased the frequency and fervency of my prayers it adds not a jot or tittle to the rest. That said: may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable to thee my strength and my redeemer.

I take as my text several verses of Psalm 8, the psalm appointed for today:

When I consider thy heavens, even the work of thy fingers; the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visitest him. Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels, and dost crown him with glory and worship. Thou makest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; and thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet.

Abraham Lincoln once said: I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon earth and be an atheist but I cannot conceive how he could look upon into the heavens and say there is no God.

The first part of the psalm talks about God as creator of the universe. Here is the young David out under the stars watching his sheep. The air then would not have been darkened and polluted with smog and there would not have been streetlights to obscure the brilliance of the stars. He felt as we all have felt, perhaps standing in cottage country, under the stars overcome with a sense of mystery and awe. But the universe that the psalmist gazed up at was conceptually much smaller than that of which WE are aware. If the psalmist felt insignificant how should we feel. The Hubble telescope recently recorded the birth of a star. The photo shows a cloud of gas 170 000 light years away. In other words it would take 170 000 years traveling at the speed of light to reach it at a distance of 102 with 18 zeros miles or 102 quintillion miles. It is estimated that there are 10 billion galaxies in our universe with each galaxy containing 100 billion stars - David did not know the meaning of insignificance!

In the sight of a God who could make a universe like that, why should He care about us? In Genesis 1 vs 26 we read what God said: let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.

What does it mean to be created in the image of God? Contrary to what you may have heard God really is not some omnipotent clone of Noel Edison or even Robert Hulse. All thinking about God has to be tentative and open ended. We cannot fully understand his being and nature for that would tend to limit Him and surely we would not wish to be Children of a Lesser God. Most people in this country when asked still say they believe in God. And while they are less certain when it comes to the details of that belief, any God worthy of the name must remain beyond reason’s grasp. Martin Luther, when asked why he believed in God answered that he could do no other. He was compelled to believe and that compulsion came both from the heart and the head, the intuitive and the logical. Dr. William Osler arguably Canada’s greatest clinician said: Faith is the one greatest moving force which we can neither weigh in the balance nor test in the crucible.

Surely it takes more faith to believe that everything from the genius of Mozart and Shakespeare to the complexity of the human body to the glory of a fall day in Algonquin Park is the result of a random series of mindless purposeless events which mean nothing and go nowhere. Everyone’s favorite detective Sherlock Holmes is forever telling Watson that: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth; or on another occasion improbable as it is, all other explanations are more improbable still.

Half a century ago the idea that God created the universe out of nothing was ridiculed by scientists but in modern quantum physics and astrophysics we learn that this is happening all the time. Modern science now postulates that the universe began as a cosmic singularity with all mass and energy compacted into a single point and then exploding in the Big Bang. Surely there are parallels between this and Gods utterance: Let there be light. The fact that it took millions of years for humans to evolve from the rest of the animals makes it no less marvelous or no less God driven than an instantaneous arising from the dust. And as we read in psalm 90: A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past. God’s time is not our time.


Is it just chance that the size of the earth, the distance from the sun, the makeup of our atmosphere, the thickness of the earth’s crust, the magnetic fields of the earth, the tilt of the earth, the speed of rotation of the earth and the length of its orbit are all optimum for life on earth? And if varied slightly would preclude such life from ever developing.

Is it just chance that provided that most plants require carbon dioxide to survive and give off oxygen while we require oxygen to survive and give off carbon dioxide. Just chance that narcotics derived from the poppy can control our pain, aspirin from the willow bark treats our inflammation , digitalis from the foxglove strengthens our heart and penicillin from bread mould cures infection? The complex and precarious symbiosis of our ecosystem is truly awe inspiring.

Albert Einstein once said: Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that behind all the discernible laws, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. He continues; The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly, this is my religion. Stephen Hawking the Einstein of our generation adds: It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.

What is man that thou art mindful of him and the son of man that thou visitest him?

Shakespeare almost paraphrases the psalm in one of Hamlet’s soliloquies. What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable. In action, how like an angel; in apprehension how like a god.

I believe that being made in the image of God means sharing his creative power - to be able to create and understand the images and sonorities of art, to be able to engage in abstract thinking, to be able to distinguish between good and evil and to have the ability to make moral judgements. Right and wrong to a believer must have an objective reality beyond what is useful to the majority. In short being made in the image of God means to have the wherewithal to invent, discover, refine and perfect all of the endeavours of the species Homo Sapiens throughout the ages. The human spirit is that part of us that is able to love and experience God directly and is found in no other species. Man has a unique relationship with God. Scientists have even found what has been called a God gene. The idea is that spirituality has an innate genetic component to it. Humans inherit a predisposition to be spiritual, to reach out and look for a higher being. It strikes me that any God omnipotent and omniscient as we would have him be, neither needs nor covets our constant attention and worship. Perhaps Christ gave us the first and great commandment, to love God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind and all our strength, to answer our need to give our ultimate allegiance to some higher power.

Today’s epistle came from Romans 8 where we read: The spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God; and if children, then heirs; heirs of God.


And in 1st Corinthians 3:16 we read: Know ye not that ye are the temple of God and the spirit of God dwelleth within you?

If the spirit of God is within us and we are children of God then we all possess a spark of the creative divine. Man was to be the instrument by which God would do his work in the world and the expression of the being and character of God

What is man that thou art mindful of him and the son of man that thou visitest him?


We cannot all be Einsteins or Shakespeares or Mozarts or Robert Evans or Michelangelos or John Kissicks or Kiri Te Kanewas or Noel Edisons or Martin Luthers or Martin Luther Kings. We do however all have gifts and talents and our response to accepting our position as a child of God created in the image of God must be to make the best use of gifts that we have been given.

The psalm concludes by saying that God has given us dominion over all the works of His hands and has put all creation under our feet but surely not for us to trample on. Instead of running creation we are ruining it. In the past we have caused the extinction of untold numbers of species, we have razed and burned great swaths of the earth, we have spilled oil that has killed countless creatures in the sea and we have belched sulphurous fumes causing birds to fall from the sky and people to develop cancer and that now threatens profound climate change around the globe and perhaps our very survival as a species. Far too late we are finally coming to grips with the downside of the industrial revolution and modern society’s demands for instant gratification.


What is the purpose of life? I bet you didn’t think you would get the answers to that question today! We have been put in charge of this cosmos to tend and keep and rule it on God’s behalf so that we can protect, appreciate and celebrate the glorious work of the creator. God intends us to work in synergy with the powers of the universe but allows us to know the joy of true freedom the freedom to stumble and the freedom to make mistakes in order to attain maturity as true children of God. Let us hope we are not too slow at learning.

What is man that thou art mindful of him and the son of man that thou visitest him?


That thou shouldst so delight in me and be the God thou art;
Is darkness to my intellect, but sunshine to my heart.

Amen

Who's Your Church?

I’ve always been a John – as it were. Despite my mother’s best efforts to have me haled by my given name, David, the world has consistently conspired to make me a John. I’ve managed to avoid the police lineups and the small town newspaper’s court columns (usually associated with those so ‘christened’) – but beyond that, I’ve pretty much resigned myself to being John. (A close second, of course, being the man with two – three if you count the middle one – first names, is Howard. In those take ‘em by surprise moments, acquaintances of some years revert to the ‘hi Howard’ – but I can live with that too.) My college roommate, John Macmillan, and I apparently exchange monikers early on in first year. Evidently not a one-off.

It certainly didn’t help that at my first real job at Stratford General, I was preceded by John Howard. How confusing was that for folks already predisposed to that salutive tic? Aside from ordering a few extra blood tests and fielding calls from time to time from salesman pushing lab supplies instead of psychological tests, no real fallout from that one either. Ever the leader in this informal dyad, John, however, jumped the name queue by some years in the second incarnation of our relationship, he a long time member of St. James. (Funny, nobody’s called Nicola Sheila yet – but that’s another story.) Lorne+’s first call to our household opened with, you guessed it, ‘hello John, this is. . .’ I can cut him a little slack, already having the neural pathways well-trodden with his long time parishioner’s name. I have to say though that, at sixty plus, Jim MacDougal’s greeting ‘in kind’ did give me pause. Hard on the heels of our neighbours inviting ‘John and Nicola’ to an evening of music with close friends from the street. Johnny Cash’s closing to one of his signature (poor choice of words, that) tunes – “Call me Bill or Bob or . . . anything but Sue!” started to carry new meaning. I’m sure folks were always mixing up John and Jesus as well. Beards, sandals, hanging out with a suspect crowd. Must have been no end of irritation!

And so to the point – I suppose there is one. I was cruising through the Weekend Globe a while back and stumbled on a derivative piece around Richard Florida’s book, the darling of U of T’s new ‘Prosperity Institute’. In Who’s Your City?, he maintains that folks tend to collect in certain geographic areas congruent or consistent with their personality types. Extroverts evidently populate the Eastern Seaboard. Neurotics the Northeast; conscientious folk the Southeast; and (surprise, surprise) Open-to-Experience people the West Coast – I personally have never heard that California is the fountain head of all things fringe and flakey!

We’d gone through ‘round 1’ of Ed Leidel (VIP – Values, Identity, Purpose) and were poised for the second visit wherein the identity of St. James would be sussed out. So, having our values clarified (accepting, questing, safe, and service-driven), I was indeed curious, against Mr. Florida’s background commentary, just ‘who’ we would be deemed to be. Nicola’s blog (preceding) has taken a look at the point Ed had suggested first considering: who is the patron saint and what’s he embody? So far, so good.

I have to say that small group, meeting at the end of May, nailed it. The signature ambivalence of the Anglican community was named – well, maybe not actually named, but certainly drawn in sufficiently clear terms to be identified in a closet at midnight with the door closed and the light off. St. James is female (oh, wait for it – here comes the ambivalence) – but with strong male characteristics. The church is remarkably similar – but diverse. She / he is middle-aged, but still behaving as if she’s (he’s) thirty. She / he dresses up (and down); likes the current CBC (in passing, anyone who has listened to the ‘vibrant, new CBC’ radio 1 and 2 cannot possibly have missed that the brain trust behind this dog’s breakfast of identity crisis – talk about trying to be 30 when it’s 50! – does indeed share a great deal with our current, fence-sitting, navel-gazing, ambivalent community which seems enamoured of the idea of being all things to all people); and drinks Scotch (well thank the wee man for small mercies). And her name (I guess the male parts, as it were, got 86’d at some point) is Jamie! So we’ve got a trans-gendered, cross-dressing, mid-life crisis ridden drinker as the personality. Oh dear. Richard would have something to say about this I’m sure.

I thought my identity crisis was crippling – but maybe I’ll just go back to being a John.

Definitely the views of the Web Master (and not his Scribe)!

The Feast of Saint James

25 July is the feast day of the patron saint of our parish, Saint James the Greater. As such, I felt somewhat obliged to learn more about the man who inspired the founders of our church to name the parish in his honour.

James bar-Zebedee was a man of critical events. He was first to be called a disciple, along with his brother John. These two brothers, along with Peter, witnessed the Transfiguration of our Lord. He witnessed the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law (I was unaware of Peter’s marriage) and the raising of the daughter of Jairus. Jesus summoned James to pray along with him in Gethsemane’s garden on the night of the great betrayal. Imagine witnessing one of these events?

I wonder if Jesus knew about the personality of James before he selected him as a disciple. Given that Jesus nicknamed James and John the “sons of thunder” my imagination is stirred with images of fiery, loud, impulsively passionate workers. James wanted a hostile Samaritan village ruined by heavenly fire invoked by Jesus.

The end of James was dramatically predicted by Jesus. When the bar-Zebedee boys asked Jesus for a special place of honour in the Kingdom, the response was that a place of suffering is that place of honour. James was beheaded in the 40’s of the Common Era by the grandson of the Herod who has been attributed with attempting to have Jesus the Infant killed. James was the first disciple to be martyred.

After the first Pentecost, James went to Spain and preached the gospel. And, apparently, this is the origin of the mythical elements of the veneration of St James. The body of James was carried back to Spain and interred at Santiago de Compostela. The story goes that a rider on horseback saw the ship carrying the saint and attempted to swim out to the ship. Rider and horse sunk in the attempt before miraculously rising covered in scallop shells.

Thus, the symbols attached to our patron saint are a scallop shell, a pilgrim hat, a sword, the sacred scripture. Artists often depict him on horseback. James is also the patron saint of Spain, equestrians, veterinarians, blacksmiths and tanners.

For myself, I prefer the literal James who is recorded in the New Testament; a man so passionate about his faith that Jesus includes him in the inner circle. The best thing that I can attribute to the mythical saint is a wonderful dish, Coquilles St. Jacques...shells of St. James. Here’s a thought: let’s honour our patron saint with a Coquilles St. Jacques feast...what a fundraiser! I can almost smell the garlic and gruyere now; baquette, white wine, a tantalizing green salad, some medieval pilgrimage songs, re-enacting the horse and rider story in the Avon River...sign me up!

The Web Scribe

Take Your Seats

When we take the seat, we become our own monastery. We create the compassionate space that allows for the arising of all things. So Jack Kornfield (A Path With Heart) begins his chapter on preparing to worship – or, in his lexicon, to meditate. Jon Kabat-Zinn (Wherever You Go, There You Are) continues with his thoughts on the same topic: there is a strong sense of honouring place and placement of body and mind and moment (as we take our seat).

To the uninitiated, the un-mindful, perhaps even the disrespectful, the time (and space) before ritual is just that – room to chatter, to finish up last minute bits of business, to diffuse the nervous energy that sadly pervades our culture when its occupants are confronted with silence. I sit in theatre as the ‘show is about to begin’ and am amazed, make that appalled, by the residual ‘chitch’ (as a colleague is fond of naming idle prattle) that floats in the air once the lights are dimmed and Richard (or James or whoever chastens the noisy patrons to shut off the watch alarms and cell phones) has intoned his solemn prohibition. I (used to) stand at the start of a foot race and hear incidental accounts of last night’s pasta feed, the projected splits for two, five and eight K, the commentary on Mary’s new shoes – all intruding on the attempt to centre, focus, ground, to set fully for an important (in those days) ritual.

The capacity to listen unspeaking and indeed, to respect the individual’s need to prepare him/herself for ceremony has sadly been lost to the compulsive urgency to ‘communicate’. With the latest ‘innovation’ in communication technology –- whatever version of I-phone we’re now up to – the Globe & Mail reported text messaging to have increased ten fold in the past few years. I am passed by all manner of pedestrians (and cyclists!), oblivious to their surround, bent forward, sending or receiving what I can only assume to be mindless and largely unnecessary bits of dialogue, text. That Blackberries are now more aptly described as ‘crackberries’, that PDA-free zones are being established in resorts, and cell phones use banned or limited in a variety of venues bear testament to the near-addictive, ubiquitous, and frowned upon nature of these compulsions.

At a gathering of friends recently, a serendipitous set of circumstances thrust us all into five (seemed like fifty-five) minutes of unplanned silence. As an opening to the evening, several of us had been assigned ‘roles’ within a ‘modified liturgy’ – with the expectation that as one finished another would take up the baton. As luck would have it, not all shared the same ‘script’ – injecting a protracted ‘gap’ into the sequence. It was not long before fidgeting commenced, watches were covertly eyed, nervous glances cast at the next (presumed) presenter, himself sublimely oblivious to the ‘order of service’. Ultimately our host provided the requisite nudge to get things going again – but not before those present had opportunity to move through a surprisingly complex sequence of thought – given that ‘nothing’ was going on: an expected moment of reflection?; is it my turn?; is this a test of some sort? And with it the chance to share responses to the experience. We broke into two camps: those whose discomfort grew as the seconds ticked by, needing to scratch that compulsive itch (to speak); and those who settled into a resolve of sorts, bent on embracing the time and ‘emptiness’ for reverie – a preparation for the balance of the evening.

Like the sacred bow as one prepares for practice, settling, ‘taking one’s seat’ to begin service – be it a ‘full Sunday event’ or simple gathering in chapel, shared (what’s that expression) ‘where two or three are gathered together’ – is part and parcel of the sacred space, the reverential preparation for a special event. I suppose I can and should (no, I needn’t go that far) tolerate the public compulsion, the twitch to check that incoming text message, email, or phone call – wherever, whenever, and in whose ever presence.

What is becoming difficult to countenance is the incipient ‘chitch’ encroaching upon sacred events, space, and times, creeping in and squeezing these very core elements into a corner that diminishes the experience for the participants and the respect for the ritual. I expect a chapel to be a ‘no fly zone’ for those very, very brief periods through the week when a sacred event is not only in progress – but is being prepared for. I would hope that the silence that precedes a service is treated with like deference to that afforded silent prayer, interpolated into that service. A practice that I have long valued is the sounding of the tingsha, little brass cymbals whose resonant, lingering tone calls participants to collect themselves – and by implication, to fall silent. Perhaps that’s what those church bells mean?

David Howard

The Sounds of Silence

Chapter 42, St. Benedict’s Rule...Silence should be sought at all times by monks and nuns and this is especially important for them at night time.

I mustn’t get out enough. Trends come and go before I am even aware that they are a trend. Take for example reception areas for the public. My recent sojourn into SGH had me in a waiting room for a reasonably short period of time. If knitting does not accompany me, a book does. Comfortably seated, number in hand (the Privacy Act precludes hospital staff using your name in the waiting room; one becomes a number to protect one’s privacy. Unfortunately, when one is in the next stage of the process, nothing is private, including one’s ‘privates’; an irony shared in humour by the nurses).

Anyway, back in the waiting room that I am sharing with two anxious mums with their equally anxious very young daughters and few other old timers such as myself, I am bombarded by CNN on the overhead big screen television monitor that peers down at us like some modern-day gargoyle. The volume is overly loud; the very earnest newsreader is incessantly updating us with reports from a U.S. manufacturing facility where a disgruntled employee has shot seven fellow workers and his supervisor. No details were spared. Desperately attempting to concentrate on my book, I couldn’t help but think what my very young and innocent companions were thinking as they eyes were glued to the TV monitor. By the time that my number was called, I was quite relieved to leave the area.

Post-surgery visit to surgeon’s office was another audio blast. The doc was an hour and one-half late; his receptionist whispered to me as I checked in ‘that things were really backed-up and she still hadn’t been able to locate him yet’. No problem; I had my knitting. Out in the waiting room, six other patients were vocally grumbling and visibly irate. Unfortunately, the country and western station was blaring loudly to us about heart-broken cowboys in pick-up trucks; it didn’t help the mood.

Today, I had an appointment with my G.P. The building has been under renovations for some time now. The new reception area is huge, well-lit and yep...there it is, up there peering down at me again...the audio-visual gargoyle of reception areas. I was relieved to see that it’s not operational yet. Unfortunately, the sound system is quite operational. This time, my host is a Kitchener soft rock station with ’96 minutes of commercial-free sounds of my favourites’. Sorry folks, my favourites include my new Mahler 10th symphony recording and music from the renaissance and baroque periods...not Annie Lennox, the Eagles, Amy Grant et al.

No problem, I have my knitting. However, as the pattern is quite simple and the music quite loud, I am incessantly distracted by the chatter with the commercial-free period. Every second song, I am reminded by the station that this is a commercial-free time. Well, I am almost answering out loud, ‘what’s your definition of a commercial, mister?’ The announcer, as well, keeps telling all of us, how much better our work environment is because we have the radio blaring at us. Really? If I am having some issues concentrating, then what about the staff who are in the same area and exposed to all of ‘these great sounds’ while attempting to work.

The clincher came from another non-commercial commercial. A personal testimony of a listener who could not possibly manage driving on today’s stressful roads without the station’s music lulling her into a state that ‘allowed her to zone out so completely that when she pulled into her driveway, she had no idea how she got there’.

This meditative state for which the listener is so profoundly thankful is very disturbing to me. A novice at meditation, I look forward to the time when ‘the complete zone-out’ occurs; but, not while I am in control of a very powerful mass propelling amongst others at high speeds, thank you very much.

I am called to a brand spanking-new examination room. After the short interview, the nurse practitioner readies things for the doctor which includes turning up the sound system as she leaves. I request silence, please.

In 1952, the American composer John Cage wrote a three movement piece entitled 4’ 33”. It is a composition for any instrument or combination of instruments. ‘The performer or performers come out onto the stage and take their places. And then, they sit. They sit for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. They sit and sit and sit; the audience sits and sits and sits. After the initial uncomfortable period, after the coughs and nervous shuffling settle, people start listening. From the sounds of silence come gentle but subtle sounds...fabric rustling, breaths, paper shuffling, even the subterraneous rumbling of a subway. John Cage’s goal was to teach his audience to listen by actually programming silence’.

More than fifty years later and with the technology today, silence is a lost art form. Full awareness listening is not trendy. Much better that one should be listening and driving or working as well as talking to co-workers simultaneously.

Nearly 1600 years before John Cage, Saint Benedict understood the need for silence in daily life. Chapter 42 of his monastic rule programmed silence into the lives of monks and nuns.

As Joan Chittester OSB writes, “Silence has two functions. The first effect of external silence is to develop a sense of interior peace. The second value of silence is that it provides the stillness that enables the ear of the heart to hear God who is ‘not in the whirlwind’. The constant blaring breaks the peace of the heart and agitates the soul. Day after day, month after month, the incessant noise thickens the walls of the mind until it become impossible to hear the talk within us that shows us our pain and opens our mind to the truths of life and the presence of God. We live with noise pollution now and find silence a great burden, a frightening possibility. Muzak fills our elevators and radios are set into wrist watches and TV’s blare from every room in the house from morning until night. We say that we do not have the time to think but what we actually lack is the quiet to think. Yet, until we are able to have at least a little silence every day, both outside and in, both inside and out, we have no hope of coming to know either God or ourselves very well.”



I leave you with a poem by Rachel M. Srubas from her book Oblation.

Catching Your Breath

I hear the twilight falling, soft a linen over the earth.
I hear the soil drinking its dew.
I hear my own ear receiving you,
The shell of my flesh catching your breath,
Its concealed canal and deeper drum humming
In answer to your prayer for the world,
More music than word. It sings inside me.
My silence, at its finest, harmonizes.

July 11, Saint Benedict Day; for Fiona
The Web Scribe