THAT Is My Neighbor?

For days afterward, I couldn’t get Mark out of my head.

He took a room at Holy Cross Monastery during my last retreat—and he scared me. Well over six feet, chiseled, imposing, with a hard look in his eye, he never ate, rarely slept, and wandered the halls muttering to himself. The first time he started a conversation with me, he came out with a ramble of spiritual ideas and cited Satan as his teacher for at least one of them.

I assumed he was dangerous, or at least sinister. I thanked God I was not like him. And that was the problem.

Mark’s presence, together with some other guests who were “different” in their own way, made me realize how quickly I rush to judgment. I compare myself to others, disdaining many, including those who fly off the end of my approach/avoidance curve.

The funny part is, I think of myself as open-minded and compassionate, especially to those less fortunate. In much of my life, perhaps I am.

But God keeps pushing us, confronting us with the raw reality both within and outside ourselves. Exactly how wide can I throw my tent? I say I accept all people—but what about him? “The poor,” whom I can so easily romanticize, may not always look noble or dignified; can I deal?

The beauty of this Divine push, at least as I’ve experienced it, is that it is phenomenally gentle—and sometimes comes with visible grace. The last morning of my retreat, I was out on the porch, turning these things over in my mind, when who should come out but Mark. He started a conversation with his version of “hello”: “Have you ever read…?” For about 15 minutes, he rambled on about Jesus, monks, Hindu demons, and other topics. He revealed pieces of his hard and painful life.

And finally, when I got up to leave, he shook my hand, thanked me, and apologized for “laying all this stuff on you.”

The day before, the thought of that conversation would have made me queasy. When it happened, though, it was all blessing. It left me with a glimpse into my own raw heart, a tent that maybe got a little bit bigger, and another story of the extraordinary, awe-inspiring grace of God, who pushes and pulls and encourages and loves and throws challenges in our way so we take that next step toward the Divine.

Finding Your Way into the Future

The world gives us some extremely good advice for setting goals. Too bad we can’t follow it—at least not exactly.

The whole idea of goal setting pervades our world. “When you fail to plan, you plan to fail” ranks high among the business world’s pearls of wisdom. Smart executives set objectives for everything, from this morning’s meeting to the next product launch. Job seekers prepare for the inevitable interview question “Where do you want to be in five years?” Parents sigh over their adult children who “have no direction.”

There’s a lot of value in setting goals. It’s hard to make progress in anything without some idea of where you’re going. And yet, for people of faith, there is a pull in another direction as well.

In many faiths, we commend our lives entirely to God’s care and direction. Christians take their cue from Jesus in Gethsemane, where, wrestling with God in the most agonizing moment of his life, he finally said, “Your will be done.” In that simple yielding, he expressed the profound truth that, ultimately, our futures do not belong to us. (This can bring indescribable joy and, ironically, freedom, but that’s for another post.)

What does all this mean for goal setting? Simply that the dynamic of our unfolding lives is different from the norm. We do not plan our future so much as we respond to a call. We aim not to strive for personal goals, but to seek and fulfill the Divine will.

Now maybe, if we heard God’s calling all at once, we could use goal setting to create a framework that would help us fulfill it. But to make matters even more complex, God seems to call us only a little at a time. How can we lay out detailed plans when we don’t know exactly where we’re going?

Instead, we engage in an ongoing, slowly emerging dialogue with God. Two or three years ago, I sensed a nudge to write. It unfolded gradually: poetry came first, then this blog, and finally, about a year and a half ago, a call to “write books.” I still struggle with what this means. I have to be sure I don’t glom my personal ambitions onto this call—can I earn a living this way (please), can I quit my job immediately and just write books (please please please), etc. Rather, I have to let the call unfold as it will, while preparing my heart—via prayer, meditation, dialogue with others, and silence—to hear it.

I think we can use goal setting to gently shape what we hear, to facilitate its taking on a concrete form. But for believers, there is another step that both precedes and pervades the goal-setting process: listening. By always listening to the Divine voice, we learn to hold our plans lightly, realizing that they may change or refocus according to the Will whose fulfillment, after all, is our ultimate goal.

Lessons from the Ordinary

The fruits of the Spirit get less and less showy as we go on. —Evelyn Underhill, The Fruits of the Spirit

I just spent four days on retreat at Holy Cross Monastery. Normally when I visit there, even for an overnight, something happens. An encounter with the monks might raise a personal issue, and I use the monastic quiet to grapple with it. I consider God’s call on my life and discover an exciting new dimension. A scripture reading from the Office (the daily cycle of formal prayer which includes praying the psalms) strikes a chord in my soul. A profound lesson pervades the whole retreat.

This time was different. In fact, it was spectacularly ordinary: no great emotions, few profound insights. I took a walk at a nearby nature preserve, hoping to enjoy The Serenity Of Nature, but what I mainly got was winded. I walked into the Office, said the prayers, let my mind wander as usual, and walked out. There were a few exceptions—the writing I did was intensely joyful, and I had one encounter that will wait for another blog entry—but in general my retreat was awash with the commonplace. No profound lesson.

And yet that was the lesson.

Over the years, I’ve slowly learned to appreciate the fleeting nature of mountaintop experiences and breathtaking flights of spirit. Even so, I still unconsciously seek out the emotional payoff, the profound insight, the moment of bliss, the one tidbit that will validate my prayer and my life with God. Those payoffs and insights are not bad in themselves, but as objects of our focus, they distract us from the nearly imperceptible presence of God in the really, really ordinary—the dull and tedious and even annoying.

When we do perceive that presence, we encounter extraordinary grace. God is present during prayer whether my mind is on God or on lunch. God is present whether I serenely glide through the woods or cuss as I trip over every root. God is present, in short, even when life is routine and we are comically clueless. What a comfort.

I see the monks live out this “presence in the ordinary” every time they pray. There are few dreams or prophet ecstasies in their prayer. When the bell calls them to the Office, they put down their work, go to the chapel, pray, and go back to work. Rather than an ecstatic experience, prayer becomes seamlessly interwoven into their daily lives. And as my spiritual director says when his mind wanders during prayer, “There’s always next time.”

By finding God in the ordinary, we open ourselves to a minute-by-minute awareness of his action in our lives. We start to observe, and rejoice in, a cosmos permeated with the Divine presence. Our gratitude deepens, and so does our joy.