The Advent Artist

There were artists here several years ago and I wrote about them. I was thinking about them early this morning, sitting in church in the darkness of a predawn hour. What came to mind was how I watched them paint. Each artist did so differently, depending on many things. An artist’s style is unique. Like a voice to sing with, or a fingerprint, or a way of seeing. The slow movement of a brush across stretched canvas or other surface reveals the unique signature of the artist.
I remember watching a woman’s hand as she applied a dab of color to her rendition of our Abbey Church. How she envisioned our church had much to do with the uniqueness of her style. She was expressing something of herself with the form she painted, the colors she used – their tone, texture, the soft placement of the medium on the canvas.
The world teems with self-expression. But the world is a big place. Perhaps it is better to limit myself to the every day.
A bird builds a nest, sensing within her a stirring of life, the tiny start of an egg. The bird has exquisite timing. The nest will be ready when it is time for the bird to settle into it, lay her egg or eggs, then warm the tiny chicks with her body and feed them with care. She will have to travel a distance to find food and yet will know her way back to her young. Some kind of knowing there. A pattern of behavior that is expressed through a synchronization of mating, sensing, building, waiting, birthing, feeding, flying, finding a way back, and, perhaps, repeating the whole routine when what she has raised with care flies away, but with no looking back, no sorrow. That is a kind of knowing, too.
I have read about organisms – are they called microbes? – tiny creatures who live, even thrive, in the hottest and coldest places on earth. Scientists have discovered these and marvel at how life finds a way to adapt to and inhabit places that were previously thought to be absolutely devoid of life.It was taken for granted that the conditions ruled out the possibility of life. But a kind of knowing thought otherwise. And so tiny creatures are at home in the only environment that suits them. They would perish in what we assume to be a normal habitat for life.
Kittens are born blind yet find their way to the warm underside of their mother, where they suckle. Instinct kicks in and the earliest hunger is satisfied, even before the little kittens can see. A kind of knowing moves them to a source of food that will be good for them. And the mother will hide them to keep them out of harm’s way and, later, will teach them to hunt and fend for themselves. I have seen this here at the monastery. I know I am learning something from a different but sure kind of knowing. A kind of knowing that guides the blind, keeps the defenseless safe. A knowing that prepares them for a larger world. A knowing very different from mine. A knowing as impressive as human knowing.
My eyes adjust to the darkness in the church and I can find my way in there. I never have to think about the magic of my eyes – they seem to know very well just how far to widen or narrow their lens-like retinas, allowing for just the right filtering of light. I do not know how my eyes know how to do that. And how does an image travel to the brain? How can flesh and blood see? And, more, how can it be that we see, interpret, remember, associate, and seek to better see and understand all at once – all in a single glance? Something, huh? It happens all the time, even when we dream, and the real meaning of it all escapes me. But there is persistence to it all. Perception, in all its fascinating and connected circuitry, is relentless in its capacity, its seeming need to render experience graspable, intelligible. As if experience, the world itself, has a mind, even a heart, and wants to be known. It “all” beckons and we are obviously curious. In fact, in seems that we have no choice in the matter. An infant looks about with a curiosity. A dying man hopes that his curiosity will not die with him.
Someone knows us.
We come from that someone.
My mom and dad are gone, but something of them lives in me. I am the living expression of their love. The man and woman whose flesh and blood and spirit are truly one in me and who are inseparable in my being. I do not think about it all that much. But I did think about this morning, very early, for Christmas is nearing and I miss them. I wonder how and where they are, and what kind of knowing they “have” and share. Are they more deeply existent in the living design that is the “knowing” of all creatures, creatures great and small?
I do not know. I like to think so. I like to think that God has drawn them more fully into the mystery of life.
Is hope a way of seeing? Is hope a hint of where our knowing comes from and where it should lead? Is the purest hope that which hopes for the unseen – and all the love and beauty that lives there, somehow beyond death? I hope so.
Maybe you are an artist, you from whom we came. No, you must be that, an artist. We live in your design and you are yet at work in us, all about us, from the tiniest of living things to the farthest reaches of the universe.
I have read that we are made, in part, from carbon, a carbon that only comes from star-matter.
A burst or a bang from which the universe was born. A knowing arrived with it. A design was your dream, from the very beginning.
I hope to see my mom and dad again. I hope that is part of your design, you who live before time and in time and of time and beyond time, all at once and in me, along with a man and woman who fell in love and poured their very selves into me. I know that is true – I felt it this morning, in the dark, a dark place in which my eyes knew how to see. Yet a place in which I can easily lose my way.
Christmas nears. A beckoning to see with the heart. A promise to satisfy the hunger of the heart. A fidelity to the eternal destiny of all things. A very telling movement of the hand of God on the canvas of life, the most wondrous movement of divine artistry, a signature in the birth of a baby. A Child for whom we wait. A kind of knowing, there. I feel it in me, a movement in my blindness toward the Source of Life.

Waiting

Many years ago I was in Milan, Italy and was waiting in the train station for the train that would bring me up to Geneva, Switzerland. I knew that the train would cross the Alps on the way and I made sure I had enough film for my camera. The train had yet to pull into the station, so I looked about at the other people waiting on the platform. There was a young man, dressed in work clothes, who was leaning against a railing, his head turned away from the bustle of the terminal. I do not know if he worked there or was waiting for his train. There is a woman walking past him, carrying a shopping bag as she makes her way toward the end of the tracks. And another man is off to the corner of the picture and he, too, is dressed in work clothes that make me wonder if he is a porter, waiting for someone to assist. The photo is in black and white. I like it. Looking at it these days, some forty years later, the three people are present to me even though they traveled on long ago. The train came; people were helped as they boarded or disembarked and went their ways. But in my mind’s eye they are still on that platform, waiting.
I like the picture because I caught stillness at the right moment. I captured on film a vignette of what much of our lives is about. We are all waiting for something or someone. Redemptive possibilities, large and small, await us in a new town, a new relationship, a new way of living in this world. We all await our arrivals. But every now and then we are still in our waiting, for there is no need to go anywhere save the places of our lives, places we occupy until the hoped for something or someone comes. Such waiting was made internationally famous in the Samuel Beckett play “Waiting for Godot.” Most recently, the magnificent novel “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy traces the plight of a father and a son who survive a near total destruction of all life on the planet and who slowly make their way to a nameless coast, despairing of a redemption that no longer seems possible. Yet it emerges out of the desolation and destruction which is the sole landscape of the book (now also a film). Redemption is a strange and unexpected grace that we carry within ourselves and is perhaps ushered into being when we have played our last and seemingly fatal card. It rises from our despair when there is nothing left for which to hope. But rise it does, comes it does. It is on its way.
I remember what the Alps looked like, and I did take pictures as the train passed through those magnificent snow covered heights. But the memory of the men and woman in the Milan station are clearer to me. I shared their waiting. And I still do.
Advent is a time of waiting. It is a time when we are asked to ponder the very meaning of time – our moments, hours, days and years. We tend to fill time with experiences that enhance it. We like to dress up time. Rarely do we let it be, and in that stillness allow it to reveal what it carries. For it carries a promise in that the Incarnation has redeemed time and our waiting. Someone is coming, reaching out to us from the very beginning and end of time and in that reach touched every instant of existence with his presence. God is among us, using time and our lives to gradually reveal the fullness of his work among us.
The truth of human life is that we must wait. Advent offers us time to ponder the goodness of whom we await. We may be tempted to fill our lives with whatever we can to rob time of its tediousness. But the stillness that comes our way – as we find it in a train station or in the slow reading of a novel, allows us to savor the wealth of the present moment as it opens our hearts to the beauties of life, beauties as simple as two men and woman waiting in a station in Milan, and perhaps going somewhere to ease the larger waits of their lives. But I saw them, and remember them. They were, and still are, beautiful on that long ago platform, waiting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monastery Guests

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lost and Found

I have been thinking a lot about him ever since I read about him in the paper. His name is Francisco. He is thirteen- years-old and he was lost. He lives in New York and it might be closer to the truth to say that he intentionally moved into the realm of the lost. He did so by running away from his home and riding the subways. He spent eleven days and nights riding miles beneath the vast city above him, managing to evade detection even though he rode in plain sight. He survived on what little he could buy from newsstands. He stretched the ten dollars he had and bought potato chips, croissants and jelly rolls. He drank bottled water. He used a bathroom at the Coney Island Station to wash his face and scrub his teeth.
Francisco has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism that makes social relations difficult and that can sometimes lead to isolation. A kid like Francisco has a hard time learning to connect – a painful condition as it is but especially so in a society that places such a premium on any kind of connectedness. Francisco struggles to communicate what is within his heart and on his mind – especially when a situation bears down on him demanding an immediate response. He felt he was in trouble at school and was afraid to go home. So, he sought a hiding place on the subway and rode train after train until he was spotted by an alert policeman. The policeman was one of many looking for Francisco and recognized the little boy from a flier that had been distributed throughout every precinct in the New York and surrounding areas.
But Francisco never saw the signs and according to one article I read, he said that he was prepared to remain in the subway system forever.
His family will have an especially happy thanksgiving because Francisco will be home, at the table, surrounded by a grateful and loving family. Yet his mom worries that it will happen again. She knows that Francisco might panic and bolt again if he feels trapped by his inability to communicate. “I tell him: “Talk to me. Tell me what you need. If I ever make a mistake, tell me.” She paused and said, “I don’t know, as a mother, how to get to his heart, to find out what hurts.”
I wonder how many of us identify with Francisco. We might be adults, even well on in years, and yet the sense of feeling lost may lie close beneath the surface of our lives. Life is such a long ride, and we all have difficulty communication who we are or where we really need to go, or even where we come from. There are no maps, no education, and no kind of learning or fortune-teller who can give us the definite answers to the mysteries of life. Yet there are miles and miles ahead of us. And we ride with a hope that God will somehow find us and bring us home.
Francisco is and always was surrounded by a lot of love. He lost a sense of it as he rode. He said he felt numb and lost a sense of time. But that did not stop others from looking for him and loving him all the more when he was found.
I do not think there are any sure answers in this life. But I do think we can cultivate a sensitivity to the lost riders that we all are, and trust that we will all be found. That is something for which to be thankful. And perhaps we should remember this: that God rides within us, within each of us, and has found out to reach out and offer a warn direction to those who ride with a quiet desperation. Human kindness goes a long way, and can ease the pain of an eleven day ride in the dark or a lifetime of searching in the bright light of day. It is God’s way of getting to our hearts.

Preparations

This year has flown by so fast. I realize that I am using a well worn cliché, but I cannot help but look back and wonder where the year went. Here at the monastery we are already preparing for the busy year’s end. Orders will soon be coming in for our Abbey Store items. A team of monks has been busy making enough fruit cakes, fudge and other food items to ship out during the Christmas Season. Soon, much of Conyers will follow the pattern of much of the world as lights are strung across streets and on the limbs of trees, Christmas lights that can easily lift the mood of many a traveler. The stores will soon be stocked with all kinds of gifts that can be bought, wrapped and given away to loved ones. And the Post Office will swell with tens of thousands of cards and letters, missives that express a hope for a good and holy season.
Thanksgiving is just days away. In some ways, it is a day that heralds the onset of the Christmas Season and I want to suggest a way to blend the two feasts together.
Not long ago I read a quote from Joyce Carol Oates. She mentioned how little she feels she has accomplished when she looks back on her life. Ms. Oates has written an incredibly large number of novels, essays, book reviews and critical commentaries. In terms of the written word, there are very few genres that have eluded her grasp. She has a gift for verbal amplitude and the quality of her output is as good as it is massive.
I read “We Were the Mulvaneys,” a novel she published not too long ago and loved it. The story is powerful and it still resonates within me. I suppose in a significant way, Ms. Oates’s words have become a part of me. I learned something from them, from her. And I learned good things about life, love, suffering and redemption. I am surely not alone in what I took in from Ms. Oates’s labors. Her words have found a home in the hearts of millions. Yet, she probably cannot grasp the import of her words. I do not think any author is capable of that, of measuring how far and deep their words have traveled and taken root. But take root they do.
We will soon celebrate the mystery of God’s Word being born among us. It is far off – there is much to do between now and Christmas. But the Word to be born is speaking now and we can hear and share in that language. It is the language of love, the words that speak compassion, hope, forgiveness, kindness, beauty. God speaks through us. He is born every day through us. We probably do not think of that, when we speak words from the depths of our hearts and hopes. But so much is accomplished through what we say and how we say it, on the most ordinary of our days. Life is a harvest of words, words spoken, words that take root in the rich soil of the fields of life.
Thanksgiving is a time to be grateful for the gift of language, the gift of speaking. It is a time to look back and ponder the mystery of all that we have said, and how all of it accomplishes something through the power that is God through language. Words bring society, friendship, culture and hope into being. Words are among the most important living stones in the building of God’s Kingdom among us.
The meaning of Christmas has much to do with the gift of the Word. A Word is spoken to us and lives among us and within us. We can draw the feast near, as near as this day, through a careful and tender use of words. It is a gift for which we should be grateful, for God is born again and again through our finding him through the language of love.

Horse Loggers Georgia