Some pix

Some Recent Guests at the Monastery

Communion Calls

Communion Calls

Before I came to the monastery, I was a parish priest for twenty years. Once a month throughout those years, I brought communion to people who could not make it to Mass. Such visits are known as communion calls. They were usually done on the first Friday of each month.

I had my list and drove to each person’s home. I would often stay for a while, but had to keep my eye on my watch so as not to keep the next person waiting. I knew that the people looked forward to my visits since most of them were elderly, lived alone, and did not have many social contacts. I had with me a small metal container, called a Pyx, into which I placed the hosts that were needed for the visits. And I had a little green ritual book, with a few ribbons, to mark the places where the prayers for the sick were. Most of the people knew the prayers by heart and would recite them with me, which I liked.

I was thinking about the people I knew in those days, early this morning. We had an unusual event late yesterday afternoon – it snowed for a while and there is a light blanket of snow on our fields this morning. When I looked out the window, for some reason, while gazing at the peaceful beauty of the scene, a memory came to me of Pops, a man I used to see every first Friday. He once told me that he loved snow when he was younger but as he aged it became such a worry for him. He was afraid of falling – and he did not get as many visitors.

Pops lived with his daughter and her family. His daughter’s name was Agnes. I cannot remember her husband’s name. They had an adopted daughter who at the time was a teenager. She was a very pretty girl and I heard, years later, that she became a model. Agnes would answer the door when I came to the house and after setting up a small table with lit candles, she would excuse herself and return after Pops received communion. He sat in a comfortable recliner chair and he had a small dog, a really cute dog, who would come to me with his tail wagging, would sniff my shoes, and then, seemingly satisfied that I was okay, would jump onto the recliner chair right next to Pop. There was just enough room for him. He snuggled against Pop’s thigh and was very quiet, but attentive, as Pops said his prayers and received the small host, the presence of the Lord. After receiving, he would close his eyes for a few seconds in prayer, then open them and look at me for the okay to start talking. And talk he did, about his life, his loves, his worries, his hopes. Agnes would come back into the room, offer me a soda, and then sit and join in the conversation. The little dog never moved, but always listened.

Vincent lived in a small apartment. I often had trouble finding a parking place near the building. He was originally from Greece and was on in years. He wore tailored suits, and donned the best of them when I visited him. He had quite a hair-do. The grays and whites were arranged in a style that reminded of Elvis’s early look. Vincent kept a large shrine to the Virgin Mary in his living room. It filled one corner of the room – a large shell-ike structure in which there was a statue of Mary. It was surrounded by plastic flowers and at her feet were always arranged fresh fruits, one of which Vincent always offered me before I left. “It is special, very special,” he would say.

Helen was a very large woman whose size, I think, confined her to her bed. Her husband was a small Chinese man and I never heard him say a word. He smiled a lot, and I could tell that he and Helen loved each other very much. Helen was once in the Air Force and there were pictures of her in her uniform on the walls of her bedroom. On the table near the bed was her favorite picture which she pointed out every visit I made – it was a black and white photograph of her and her husband taken while they were on their honeymoon, in Hawaii. In the picture, she was much thinner and towered over him. He was smiling in the picture – and I noticed that his smile had stayed much the same over the years.

Margaret lived alone in a huge house. She never married. She had a lot of cats. I would be reading the prayers and cats would be at my feet, in my lap, sneaking up behind me on the couch where I sat. She often told me that the cats liked me. There were pictures of Richard Gere all over the place. She said she was related to him. I wondered about that but never said anything. “Real cutie pie,” she would tell me. She was in her eighties.

I am sure they have all moved on now and live in the communion they once received every Friday. Pops. Margaret, Helen, Vincent – they are ageless and have become a part of me, in my heart, the place of all communion.

I think we, who are here on this earth, live in this communion but cannot quite see that yet. We can taste it. We can love from it. We can hope for it. We somehow take into our bodies and hearts the fullness of the life that is all around us. We are in a living banquet and are rather modest in the ways that we celebrate it. It is a banquet with honeymoons and smiling faces, cats on the sofa and doggies at our feet, of women bringing sodas and old men anxious to speak their hearts and their loves. All of this was never far from the reception of communion. All of life is a communion call – as if God is the ever present first Friday Visitor, asking that we be with him, receive him, welcome him.

I look at the beauty of freshly fallen snow – it is rare, here in Georgia, to have snow. Just yesterday I was telling a group in our retreat house that I used to love the sound of falling snow when I lived in the northeast. There was that pervasive hiss as the snow fell and touched the earth. Even when the snow stopped falling, there seemed to be a sound in the air, the sound of snow, a peaceful yet rich sound. Something like a communion of white, of innocence, of purity. Billions of hosts, coming softly to the earth, covering everything. A gift from God, as is everything, coming from above, arising from below, whispering to me as to where he is, communing with us.

The whole universe is a Mass – feeding us every day. The banquet of God, this life we live. It is special, very special.

Dylan and His Cactus Plant

Dylan and His Cactus Plant

I was over in the retreat house and had brought my camera with me. It was snowing, which is a rare event here, and I wanted to take some photographs of the gardens adjacent to the retreat house. I walked into the parlor, near the front door, and a young boy was standing there, near the door, looking out at the falling snow. He turned to me and smiled and in his hands he held a small cactus. He raised it and smiled and said that he bought it in our store and how nice Father Gerard was, the monk who sold it to him. “He told me that a flower will bloom from it, right at the top.” And with his gloved finger, he pointed to just where the flower will sprout.

I asked his name and he said “Dylan.” And he smiled again. I think that the falling snow added a special glow to his face and eyes. I asked if I could take his picture and he said he would like that, so we went into a large room and he never let go of the cactus. I took several pictures of him. Natalya, a regular guest to our retreat house, stood nearby and commented on how beautiful was Dylan’s cactus and that she was sure that the flower, when it sprouted, would be just as beautiful. Natalya is from Russia and is pursuing her doctoral degree. She is very pretty and writes beautiful poetry. Dylan beamed when she spoke to him. Later, when I downloaded the photographs, I looked at them and they turned out well. Dylan was so at ease in front of the camera. I love the expressions on his face. His mittens are of two different colors. He has his stocking cap tucked under his arm. His smiling face and the cactus are the most prominent features in the photos. Natalya is out of sight – she was behind me as I took the photographs. And, of course, the conversation is not there, either. But the words that she spoke to him with encouragement and affection surely enticed from him that beautiful smile and the gentle look in his eyes.

I do not know if I will ever see Dylan again. A lot of people come through our retreat house and, as Guest Master, I am privileged to meet them and chat with many of them, if only briefly. There are those with whom I talk with at more length. Some of the encounters grow into friendships, though such gifts are not possible to tell at the outset. Friendship evolves and blooms, according to its own beauty and pattern.

Someone recently wrote to me and in the letter she included a commentary on one of my other photographs. It was a color photo of a tree. I took the picture in autumn and there are shades of browns and greens and yellows, all visible in the leaves of the tree. She wrote of shades of human life, shades that spoke to her from the colors of the leaves. Everything in life seems to be a living icon – trees and colors, stones and walls, bridges and cacti, mismatched gloves and a young boy’s double joy of a tree in his hands and the sight of falling snow. The picture I have of Dylan is silent and yet there were words from Natalya that prompted his smile. Well, photographs do not say what they are about – but is it not true that they do kind of speak? They tell us something.

Voices surround us. Voices well from within. The colors and shades of life form for many a pattern of love, of beauty. We speak words of encouragement to each other, putting each other at ease. All the shades of life that hit us from all side and shine on everything and everyone bespeak a pattern, a design of intricate love.

I hope the flower on Dylan’s cactus blooms and I hope it is beautiful. He is young, and probably will not remember the words spoken to him by Natalya, words that made him smile, made him at ease. I hope he always is given that in life. Maybe he will become fascinated with growth – the growth of a cactus that he held in his hands, the growth that was and is the world about him.

He may think the monastery to be a strange place. I do not know. We did not speak about that. But I do know that he saw the beauty of falling snow here and was grateful for the kind and encouraging words of Father Gerard and Natalya. And so he smiled and held a gift that he hopes will bloom.

We hold Creation, this gift from God. We hold it in our hands and hearts, with mismatched gloves and smiles. It will all bloom, someday. The best of voices tell us that. The voices of God, in all its tones and shades, asking us to be still and to trust what we hold. Listen to love, in every room of life. Hold and offer every gift you have been given. Time is the blossom of God, held in the hands of a little boy, who waits for its flower. Mismatched words, perhaps, like a Dylan’s differently colored gloves. But it is how we must hold onto what we have, and each other, as the colors speak, and the poets write of what the trees say and what the heart needs to know.

The Happy Bus Driver

The Happy Bus Driver

I once knew a happy bus driver. I do not remember his name, but he drove the De Camp bus, the #66, which went from Montclair, New Jersey to Manhattan. I used to take it all the time. They were real nice buses, with a lot of lights and buttons on the dash. I used to sit up front and watch the world slide beneath the wheels.

It was New Year's Day some years ago and I took a bus into New York. I met some friends for brunch and then went to the Port Authority bus terminal to catch the #66 back home. I recognized the bus driver from previous trips. He was always so friendly. He took my ticket with his usual sincere smile and I found a seat near enough to the front to see the lights and the road ahead. After giving the number of passengers to the dispatcher....a guy who stood near the bus and always wore cowboy boots and a cowboy hat...the dispatcher whistled and with a wave of his hand okayed the departure of the bus. The bus was full. So off we went into a new day, a New Year, on toward my home town.

Troubles started half way home. Traffic was backed up for miles on Route

3. The bus stopped. It inched forward and stopped again. The red and yellow rear lights of automobiles, trucks, vans and buses twinkled for miles ahead. I heard grumbling behind me. At first it was barely noticeable. A few coughs, a little swear word or two. But then the grumbling increased in volume. It sounded like a terrible human orchestra tuning up for a song they did not know at all.

The bus driver looked at me in his rear view mirror and smiled. "Watch this," he said. And he then turned off Route 3. I had never seen that done before. In my experience, stuck bus drivers always stayed stuck. They preferred, for whatever reason, the slow crawl as opposed to pulling off the road.

The bus driver started to sing Christmas carols. He had a good voice. His voice had that smooth Perry Como quality to it. When Perry Como sang, even the worst things in life were given a silver lining.

We went through Rutherford, a part of Lyndhurst, a section of Clifton.

The bus driver knew the streets as well as the words and melodies of the carols he was singing. As he guided the bus along, the mood of the bus changed. People began to sing, and smile, and everything seemed as twinkly as the lights on the dash of the bus.

Bernard Lonergan was a Jesuit theologian. Some have called him the greatest religious thinker since Aquinas. His stuff is complicated. I tried reading him more than once, but got stuck a lot, not unlike the vehicles on Route 3 that New Years morning. But Lonergan once said something to a friend of mine and I have never forgotten it. Religious maturity, said Lonergan, has a lot to do with "sitting back and realizing that God is the driver of the bus." By "bus," Lonergan was referring to human life, the cosmos, history....this vast mystery we are moving through and that has a Driver and plenty of lights. Lots of twinkly lights.....headlights, rear lights, dashboard lights, stars, human eyes and hearts, dispatchers who sport western wear in an eastern metropolis, happy bus drivers, and words that come from human hearts.

Well, we all got to where we were heading for that day. There was no extra charge for the songs, for the happiness of that bus driver and his wondrous detour.

I saw him in Montclair months later, in a diner. I asked a friend of mine about him and he said to me "Yeah, lives alone, not far from here. Drives a bus and he's crazy. Sings all the time." I felt sad when he said that. But then there are those among us who loathe detours and who have little patience with those who sing through the blues.

God will get us where we were all made to go. It is a good ride. Trust the lights, the detours, and listen real close to you heart when things seem to get panicky. Listen for a song, a soft melody. It will ease you and help you to trust the God who is just ahead in the driver's seat. Some say God does not exist. Some say he is crazy. Don't pay them any mind. Just listen to the song, and watch the lights. We are all moving somewhere...