Love and its Rewards

The Angelus. Jean-Francois Millet.

 Snowy fields, rural Quebec.

Francis of Assisi granted all of reality, even elements and animals, an intimate I-Thou relationship. He called all things “sister” and “brother.” This could be a definition of what it means to be a contemplative, which is to look at reality with much wider eyes than mere usability, functionality, or self-interest, but with inherent enjoyment for a thing in itself as itself. Remember, as soon as your loving needs or wants a reward in return, you have backed away from divine love, which is why even our common notion of a “reward in heaven” can keep us from the actual love of God or neighbor! A pure act of love is its own reward, and needs nothing in return. Love is shown precisely in an eagerness to love.

--Fr. Richard Rohr

Every other week, I write a short reflection for the meditation group I facilitate, and that's what I'll be doing later this morning. The quotation above was in Rohr's daily meditation today, and it struck home, so it became my starting point. All of my meditations this fall have been about different aspects of "letting go." Letting go of the desire for reward is a pretty important, and extremely difficult, lifelong task. It's certainly something I've struggled with myself, and that makes it easier to write about.

The contemplative group meets on the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month, at the cathedral, downtown, at 5:45 pm. In the summer it's hot and stuffy, and we hear the busy sounds of the city outside mingled with the whirring of fans as we sit; light still streams through the brilliant colors of the stained glass. When we open the big red doors and walk outside, an hour later, there's still sunlight on the big formal beds of tulips and, later, begonias and coleus; the homeless people and itinerant kids who sleep on our grounds will be lolling around, sharing something to eat, playing with their dogs -- last summer one of them had a ferret on a leash -- and we'll greet each other with a wave and bon soir. The day still stretches ahead of everyone, even at nearly 7 pm.

Now it's dark already by the time we arrive. The big stone cathedral may be too warm, or it may be chilly: it's hard to predict, so I wear layers. I come to the cathedral early to set up the chapel with a rug, cushions, chairs, and a single candle at the center of our rectangle. Then I might have coffee or do an errand, but I come back in time to attend Evening Prayer, or Vespers, at 5:15, which is chanted on Tuesdays.

There may be five of us, or seven, or maybe as many as ten. The church is dim; an icon stands in front of the chancel steps; candles are burning there and on the candle stands to the right and left, and sometime someone wanders in, comes up, and lights a candle during the service. At the beginning of the service, the leader - always a lay person - calls us to worship, and then the church bells in the tower above us ring the Angelus: three bells, three bells, three bells, nine bells. The day is done; the potato-diggers in Millet's field -- which looks so much like rural Quebec -- stop and pray. Then the lights come up enough for us to see our psalters and prayer books, and together we chant a psalm and the canticles for the day's liturgy; the lessons for the day are read aloud - one from the Old Testament and one from the Gospels; and then we pray for the world, for the sick and dying, the homeless and lonely, the prisoners and captives, for our city, for each other. We pray by name for the people who have asked us to pray for them; there are always white slips of paper in a container near the candlestand; unfolded they contain a name, or sometimes a little more information: "Susan. Celine. Ma mere. For Charles who is in hospital. Pour la memoire d'Antoine."

Our chanting is supposed to be in unison, and we try; in the time since I've been doing this the chant has improved. But these are not professional singers and that is the beauty of it. I always recall Thomas Merton's struggles "in choir"-- the choir of monks who sang the "daily offices" in his monastery -- and after smiling in recognition of his discomfort and our shared tendency toward perfectionism, I let go of the idea that our singing -- including my own singing -- needs to be perfect. It is perfect, however it is.

And then when Evening Prayer is finished, I get up and go to the meditation chapel and light the big handmade-by-nuns candle that I brought for us from Mexico. I sit down, and wait for the participants to gather. Again, we may be four, or six, or nine. I welcome everyone, explain the order of things to any newcomers, give my little talk, for ten minutes or so, and then we sit in silence for twenty minutes, when there is a bell, and some people leave, and others sit for another twenty.

When we finish, the cathedral is very dark, and even dim color is hard to distinguish in the stained glass windows. The verger will lock up, or sometimes the liturgical dancers come in for a rehearsal; tonight I think there's a poetry workshop. But we'll remain in silence as we return the chairs to their normal configuration, put away the candle and the rug, straighten up the room, and then leave through the side door.

Outside, now, the ground is frozen, and the homeless people will be wrapped up in sleeping bags and cardboard along the side of the Bay -- the department store across the street -- or wandering in the metro before trying to find the place where they'll spend the night. These are people who don't want to go to shelters, or aren't allowed in because they use drink or drugs, or keep a dog. During the days, some of them will have come inside the cathedral to get warm, and at night some continue to sleep on the stone steps under the front portico facing St. Catherine Street. Though it must be very cold they seem to feel that they're safe with their backs to the old stones and the gargoyles grimacing above them; that, in some way, it's their home.

Francis of Assisi granted all of reality, even elements and animals, an intimate I-Thou relationship. He called all things “sister” and “brother.” This could be a definition of what it means to be a contemplative, which is to look at reality with much wider eyes than mere usability, functionality, or self-interest, but with inherent enjoyment for a thing in itself as itself. Remember, as soon as your loving needs or wants a reward in return, you have backed away from divine love, which is why even our common notion of a “reward in heaven” can keep us from the actual love of God or neighbor! A pure act of love is its own reward, and needs nothing in return. Love is shown precisely in an eagerness to love.

Comments

[Pablo]

Thank you Beth. You may yet get me back into a church. Happy Thanksgiving, if you are celebrating the US version. If not, best wishes. Paul

[Rubye Jack]

An act of love is its own reward because it feels good inside to be kind and to care. It's that simple. Thanks for the reminder. I need to find a group like your's but it is hard for me because I'm such an isolationist. However, your thoughts here make me want to get up and out and involved in life.

[Roderick Robinson]

It's the minutiae that help. The internal monologues (dialogues some would have it) of prayer, meditation and mere thought must necessarily be obscure; to the reader they are given reality by the visible detail. Privacy but privacy made sharper by the procedures and the surrounding things. The candle lighting, the sitting down and the standing up ( yes, we're in a church), the rug put away. How Eliot-ish those last four words.

The Christian rationale is beyond me but I understand cold, I wonder appalled at how one sleeps out-of-doors in Canada in winter, I despair at lives reduced to mechanical sequences because of addiction, I'm inappropriately amused by the instincts of a trained voice in the company of voices that are not trained. I fear that what you depict means more to me than what Fr. Rohr writes and I reflect irreverently on your references to flowers - an area of ignorance in my case but one that might have to be rectified if flowers are called for in the next piece of fiction I write. I daydream on the periphery of your event, an irrelevance but an observant irrelevance.

How many layers of clothes?

[Duchesse]

I love the notion of an I-Thou relationship with all animals and elements. (Professor Buber, meet Francis.)