the cassandra pages

Love Takes Many Forms

Happy Valentine's Day, a day late!

Last week we spent a day at Museo Franz Mayer for the Decorative Arts. The collection is housed in a former church, hospital and monastery. One of the exhibitions displayed the treasures of the convent for the Discalced Carmelites, the order founded by Saint Teresa of Avila, the Spanish mystic (1515-1582). The treasures are presented along with a history of the order and this particular foundation, and a detailed look into the life led by the nuns.

The house had a lifesize polychrome statue of Saint Teresa, dressed like a wealthy woman of the period, in embroidered velvet with sewn-on pearls - as my friend V. exclaimed "She NEVER would have worn that!" - and of course she's right! This figure looks like a doll but it's five feet tall; sometime I'd like to research and write about the Mexican tradition of making these polychromed figures, which are most often Jesus or the Virgin, and incredibly lifelike. I think wax is applied over the paint to give a such a flesh-like appearance.

The abbess also had an extraordinary robe, embroidered (a better word might be "encrusted") entirely with silver threads.

There were fascinating documents in calligraphic handwriting, including one bearing the signature of Saint Teresa herself. 

And, of course, there are relics. A piece of the heart of St. Teresa; a piece of the flesh of her friend and mentor, the great mystic St. John of the Cross; two rose-colored fabric hearts that supposedly touched her garment; and (more touchingly, at least to me) a tiny sandal that St. Teresa supposedly wore, housed in a delicate crystal box and covered with flowers.

The women who entered this order in New Spain were often daughters of wealthy aristocrats; some are shown in life-size paintings, their heads crowned with elaborate bouquets of roses. When they took their vows of solemn profession, the nuns became "brides of Christ," sworn to a life of chastity, poverty and obedience. I did not know that this order included the practice of self-mortification, but the display included these metal whips, covered with vicious barbs and thorns, used by the nuns to flagellate themselves:

If it's hard to imagine why anyone would do this, especially women, perhaps this painting gives a clue: here is Christ as "The Divine Spouse", lying in a bed of flowers, into which are inscribed the instructions for a devout life: "Gratitude," "Love", "Penance," Renunciation, mortification.

Is it such a huge leap from teen-age girls going crazy over modern rock stars? With an image like this as one's only object of devotion, and a completely cloistered life, I can imagine love-sick, sexually-repressed young women resorting to extremes to win his favor, even though there seems to be a huge contradiction between the peaceful atmosphere of convents and monasteries, the beautiful embroideries and paintings, and what went on behind the closed doors.

El Papa

Pope Francis' image is everywhere - here he is, almost lifesize along the route his motorcade will take to the Zocalo tomorrow. On the far right, you can also see his face on the side of a phone booth.

Readers of this blog know about my longstanding interest in religions and how they intersect with culture and politics, so it may not be a surprise that we timed our visit to Mexico City this year to coincide with visitation of Mexico by Pope Francis. He arrived tonight - in fact, we watched his flight come in from our hotel room - it was unmistakable because all air traffic had ceased for a long time beforehand, and the plane was large. The tv coverage showed his arrival at the Presidential Hangar, greeted by a mariachi band and folkloric dancers, thousands of cheering (handpicked? specially invited?) Mexicans in grandstands, President Pena and his wife (they were both married when they got together, but were granted a special divorce/marriage permission by the Vatican - don't get me started), and phalanxes of Mexican cardinals and governmental ministers.

We attended Obama's inauguration, and have participated in huge political demonstrations in New York City, so I thought I'd seen crowd control and security, but none of that has come anywhere close to what is happening here. Jonathan will be covering the subject in much greater detail on his blog, but here are a few pictures from today; tomorrow we'll try to get close to the actual events and crowds, and see the motorcade as the Pope travels up to the Basilica of Guadalupe to say Mass.

Part of the barricaded motorcade route, the Zocalo in the distance. There are three separate checkpoint zones that people will have to pass before reaching the venues where the pope will be appearing, and there will be 10,000 soldiers in the city in addition to all the city and federal police and civilian volunteers.

These guards gave a big smile for the camera, though.

Yesterday in the late afternoon, we went up to one of the terrace restaurants high above the Zocalo to drink tequila and take some pictures with a bird's-eye view of the preparations for tomorrow's crowd when the Pope goes to the National Palace (on the far side of the square) and the walks over to the Metropolitan Cathedral, on the left. There are big screens that will show live video, and the Zocalo itself is gridded with pens that with contain the crowds in small enough numbers both for security, and to protect the people themselves. The rather tiny light brown structure at middle left, in the roadway, is a temporary grand entrance leading to the cathedral; when we walked by it yesterday, there was a tent containing potted calla lilies to be placed on the stage, and a metal wall that will also be filled with plants to make a green backdrop for the Pope's remarks or blessing, and, of course, for the photo op. We won't try to go there; we'll watch on tv, and try to see his motorcade elsewhere.

As I've said before, I admire this Pope, as popes go, and hope he'll be safe here. In order to make the points he wishes to make, he will be visiting some very dangerous places, and as we've watched these preparations in such a complicated and chaotic city it's been obvious that no amount of planning or force could guarantee his safety here. I can't help but be reminded of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, the people who revered him, and the governmental powers who wanted him silenced. So I hope all will go well.

Pennsylvania

January 17, rural Pennsylvania. This is a Quaker house of many books, in every room, collected over a lifetime. The shelf closest to my bed where I wake is devoted to religion and spirituality: I glance over the titles and see biographies of William Tyndale, Francis of Assisi and Gandhi, but the focus of the collection is Quaker thought and Quaker history. It's Sunday, and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law are already at Meeting. A soft morning light filters through the bare branches of tamaracks, and a dozen mourning doves peck and coo beneath the bird feeder in a gnarled old quince.

I read a little of William Penn's writings, and then look him up and realize I know next to nothing about this man I think of as a founding father and colleague of Benjamin Franklin's, but who was actually born 60 years earlier. As a young man at the time of Cromwell, Penn was imprisoned in the Tower of London for his Quaker beliefs, disinherited by his aristocratic Anglican father, but eventually released and reconciled. He received his inheritance and a grant from the King, and founded the province of Pennsylvania as a haven for England's persecuted Quakers, advocating peace, pacifism, the equality of men and women. His writings and thought were greatly admired by Voltaire, and later by that other Pennsylvanian, Franklin, but Penn - too generous, and a poor manager - finally died penniless in England.

The calendar tells me it's Franklin's birthday today: unlike the Wikipedia (also celebrating, but only 15) Franklin would be 306 today; Penn, 372. Those centuries compress as we drive through the countryside of Bucks County, past one colonial homestead after another, built of solid fieldstones, set into a landscape of streams and rolling fields that Penn must have loved, and Franklin and Washington no doubt saw with their own eyes. A revolution, and pacifism: how did those ideas coexist then? Penn wrote: "My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot: for I owe my conscience to no mortal man."

 

A new book from Phoenicia!

Poetry by
Ivy Alvarez,  Rachel Barenblat, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Chana Bloch, Leila Chatti, Luisa A. Igloria, Mohja Kahf, Vivian Lewin, Vinicius de Moraes (Natalie d'Arbeloff, trans.), Roderick Robinson, Nic Sebastian, Claudia Serea, Purvi Shah, Rosemary Starace, and Marly Youmans

Illustrated and Edited by
Elizabeth Adams

Over at Phoenicia, we're excited to announce that Annunciation is now available for pre-order (at a special price through November 20), and that books will be shipping toward the end of November, in time for the holidays. The website also contains  process notes written by the contributors, and they are pretty fascinating.

For me, it's the first time I've illustrated a book with linocuts, and represents the culmination of nearly a year of thought and artwork (see the links below), as well as the editing challenge of inviting and working with many talented poets on a single project.

Many of the poets will be familiar to readers of this blog; I got to know some of them back during the qarrtsiluni days. Others are new acquaintances who I'm very happy to know, and feel privileged to publish. Because part of my incentive for the book was to look at Mary from an interfaith, as well as secular, perspective, the poets are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and secular, and they've brought an amazing breadth to this volume. I am moved by the way in which each poet has managed to identify with Mary, and express some personal point of connection with clarity, emotion, and immediacy. It could have turned out to be a "religious" book but it's much bigger than that -- it's a human book.

So please take a look - I hope some of you will take advantage of the special price. (The pre-orders really help me to gauge how many books to print, too.) Thanks very much for your encouragement during the year as some of the illustrations unfolded here. I hope you'll like the result; it's been a labor of love for all of us and something I think we can all be proud of creating.

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Gabriel's Lily

Narrow and Wider Views: Niqab and Election Day

In an hour or two, I'll be voting in Canada for the first time. Oddly enough, this morning I got into the metro during the morning rush hour, and who should be standing next to me but a young woman in a niqab. Unlike headscarves, face veils are really not very common in Montreal, and when I see a woman in a niqab I usually feel disturbed, and sometimes angry, especially if she seems to be following subserviently after a man. Personally, I wish no woman felt she needed to wear one, and particularly wish no woman would ever be pressured into veiling her own face, but I was appalled by Stephen Harpur's recent remarks about this - as if I needed one more reason not to vote for him.

Some non-Muslim women here have been wearing face veils as a protest against Harper, but from the details of the veil and other aspects of her dress, and the way she was acting, I was sure this young woman was genuine. I watched her looking furtively around herself, worrying perhaps that someone would say something negative, and my heart went out to her. We were both holding onto the same central pole in the subway car,  and I decided to try to make eye contact. When she looked at me, I smiled as warmly as I could. Her eyes crinkled and lit up in a smile. We both exited the metro at McGill and I walked near her up the stairs; my main emotion was simply to be protective in that crowded place. We didn't speak; perhaps I should have tried. She went through the turnstile, turned in the opposite direction, and was lost in the crowd.

One of the reasons I part ways with most politicians is that they take positions that are all theory and no compassion, and when they single out an individual, it is often to use them for their own gain. It's far more telling to ask how we would act in an ordinary daily life situation with those who are different from us, or seem to question or even threaten our own values. Because human being tend to isolate themselves into groups of like "otherness," we often don't have the opportunity to find out. In the case of extreme religious conservatism, there are often rules that prohibit contact. But when faced with an actual real person in a real situation, I think most (certainly not all) people will find they are moved by human emotion and compassion, and will act accordingly. When observing my own emotions today, I saw this shift from theory to reality take place, and I was grateful for the encounter which showed me a deeper part of myself.

I had another encounter like this on the flight back from Berlin to Montreal this summer, when I was seated next to an ultra-orthodox Jewish couple traveling with a large family group from Israel to Montreal. I was on the aisle and the wife, much younger than me, was next to me. Neither one of them spoke to me during the whole long flight and they seemed nervous and determined to keep to themselves. We ate our separate meals, and when it was necessary for them to get up and use the restroom, I was careful to move into the aisle so the man would not have to touch me or even speak to me. Before landing, we were all given customs declarations to fill out. I did mine, but soon realized that my neighbors, heads bent together, speaking in worried voices, were having a hard time understanding the form. Finally I turned to the woman, smiled, and asked quietly if she needed some help. She gave me a relieved look, and we managed to exchange enough information in English that they were able to finish the task; she also told me that they were all going to Montreal for a family wedding. It was clear that she was nervous about the trip, and had perhaps never left Israel before. We didn't speak much more, although I would have liked to, but to my surprise, when it was time to get our heavy carry-on bags down from the overhead compartment, the husband gestured to me, asking if I needed help with my bag, which I gratefully accepted.

We all need to reach out of our self-protective little worlds and find the common ground, because it almost always exists. In my experience, it doesn't matter what the "difference" is - race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, age. It was good to discover that my bonds with these women as women and fellow travelers were  stronger than any political or feminist views on either of our sides. How much better it would be to start from there.

The Icelandic posts will continue, but the Canadian election is important and may represent a big change, so I wanted to devote a little space to it. Harper is extremely unpopular in much of Quebec and British Columbia, but it looks like the rest of the nation -- even the more conservative provinces -- may join us in denying him a majority this time around. Then it's a question of whether the Liberals and NDP can form a government together if there is no majority. Let's hope so.

Journal entry, March 11 2015

Nuts, rocks, pine cones. Watercolor and ink drawing, 3/16/2015

 

From my journal, March 11, 2015:

During Lent I've been basing the meditation talks, every other week, on the teachings and lives of different teachers from various traditions, and especially how they came to realize their calling to contemplative prayer or meditation. Yesterday evening, the talk was about having "the courage to become more and more silent." I spoke about Merton's life, and how he did exactly this, but not solely for the purpose of silence itself, but to learn to allow his words to come out of that silence. A decade ago, would I have understood what that meant? Yes and no, I suppose - it's an understanding that deepens and grows, through our own failures and embarrassments, through meditation and thinking things through. The talk ended with these words of Merton's:

"There are many declarations made only because we think other people are expecting us to make them. The silence of God should teach us when to speak and when not to speak. But we cannot bear the thought of that silence, lest it cost us the trust and respect of others." 

I'm trying recently to deliver my talks more spontaneously, after relying on writing them out and mostly reading them for the past two years. I've opened up the time beforehand a little too, speaking conversationally, making sure I greet everyone personally, keeping it more informal among us, even though we've all just entered a special space which is dark, lit only by a single candle in the center. I wanted to try to connect with the participants more informally and personally, and this seems necessary for me, too, if I am to keep going in this ministry. I'm surprised how immediate the change has been, both ways. The participants are more attentive. They stay longer, and some want to have a word afterwards; I used to ask them to leave in silence after the meditation, but I think it was unnecessary; a gentle quiet prevails anyway.  I now feel better about the ministry myself, too: more inclined to continue, more convinced that maybe it really is something I'm supposed to be doing. It may morph into something else, or end - I know that, and that's fine - but for right now, something has shifted in a positive direction.

What does it mean for me to have "the courage to become more and more silent?" Merton never stopped writing, but he learned to differentiate between what was driven by his ego and what was emanating from his higher self, and in the process his reasons for writing changed, as did his expectations for it. I'm not sure Merton was a natural introvert: he was articulate, witty, social, and chatty, although other people could really get on his nerves. He struggled a lot with his pride, with praise and fan mail, and the irony of being a cloistered monk who was famous, talked-about, sought-after. He longed for humility. So this was a long process for him, requiring a lot of solitude, reading, struggle, and self-examination. The silence he found, I think, wasn't empty at all. In fact, it was very fruitful.

Like the quilt top, which is more than half done, I think this line of thinking is a direct outcome of turning away from the online chatter. I don't miss it, and have had no trouble checking in once a day and leaving it at that. 

The over-stimulation of the everyday world, online and off, is kind of like caffeine: you don't realize what a strong drug it is unless you give it up for a while, and then you drink a cup and go "whoa!" I've been able to think and focus better without interrupting myself as often during the day -- because that's really what it was: I was drinking the drug, nobody was forcing me. There are times when I want that, and when it's probably helpful, and times to become more silent. That's all. But I do think it requires courage to turn into the silence, to face oneself, to consider change, yet again.

So the question occurs: what does this mean for my blog?

--

My semi-weekly meditation talks are archived on the Christ Church Cathedral website.

Journal entry, 2004: Anticipating a Transition

In my Vermont house, 2004

Last Wednesday I sat down to write something in my journal, and noticed that it was the 500th page of the file that I had begun in April 2004. Coincidentally, the journal begins with a quote from Merton: on Tuesday night my short talk to the meditation group had been about Merton, too, so he was on my mind.

Here's that journal entry from 2004; later I'll post what I wrote there the other day.

April 26, 2004

In winter the stripped landscape of Nelson County looks terribly poor. We are the ones who are supposed to be poor; well, I am thinking of the people in a shanty next to the Brandeis plant, on Brook Street, Louisville. We had to wait there while Reverend Father was getting some tractor parts. The woman who lived in this place was standing out in front of it, shivering in some kind of rag, while a suspicious-looking anonymous truck unloaded some bootleg coal in her yard. I wondered if she had been warm yet this winter. And I thought of Gethsemani where we are all steamed up and get our meals, such as they are, when meal time comes around, and where I live locked up in that room with incunabula and manuscripts that you wouldn’t find in the home of a millionaire! Can’t I ever escape from being something comfortable and prosperous and smug? The world is terrible, people are starving to death and freezing and going to hell with despair and here I sit with a silver spoon in my mouth and write books and everybody sends me fan-mail telling me how wonderful I am for giving up so much. I’d like to ask them, what have I given up, anyway, except headaches and responsibilities?

Next time I am sulking because the chant is not so good in the choir I had better remember the people who live up the road. The funny thing is, though, they could all be monks if they wanted to. But they don’t. I suppose, somehow, even to them, the Trappist life looks hard!

--Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas, pg 149. An entry from January 8, 1949.

Late winter woods, Vermont, 2004

It’s a grey, dark day here, and when we woke there was rain pelting against the roof. The storm has let up now, and in the bathroom the rainwater is slowing sliding down the incline of the skylight, blurring the silhouettes of the bare-branched treetops. This is the sort of weather that has been depressing me all through the late winter, but today it seems almost indescribably beautiful. It is practically the last day for bare trees; leaf buds are swelling on all the red maples and the honeysuckles are already covered with a cloud of pale green. On the apple tree outside the bedroom window, drops of water hang from the ends of each black twig, daring both gravity and time.

In less than a week, we’re heading to Montreal to live for a month. This will be the longest amount of time I’ve spent in a city in my half-century of life. We’re going as a change from the life we’ve led here, from the house we’ve inhabited for more than 25 years, from the rural countryside, from the particular web of responsibilities and patterns we’ve woven. Besides being urban, Montreal is an international city: proudly and gracefully maintaining its French heritage and a broad ethnic and cultural diversity despite its proximity to the United States and the English-speaking provinces of Canada. It is a mere three-and a half-hours from here, and a world apart.

We’ve been thinking of this month as an experiment. After several years of weekend trips and the occasional week-long stay we want to find out what our commitment to this city really is: how much do we really like living there, and what might that mean for our future? This is what I thought the month was going to be about: practical matters, finding out how we felt, considering some changes and potential investments at this gently teetering point of midlife.  Strange, then, that on this wet dark morning I felt, for the first time in several years, a strong call to contemplation. Could it be that part of this journey might be a sort of retreat, bizarre though it seems to retreat to a city? And yet I feel the call so clearly, bidding me to use the coming time and change of place not for distraction and escape, or merely for outward life decisions, but to learn something inner and as yet unrevealed.

For those who believe in God and believe, further, that She has a sense of humor, consider the irony of moving a writer - especially one steeped in the ultimate contemplativeness of rural Vermont life, complete with clapboard-clad house and vegetable garden, and a pervasive silence punctuated only by bird and cricket - to the bustle and endless distraction of a city of three million souls for the purpose of contemplation. Funny, even preposterous. But that’s what may be happening. I’ve been on this winding, unpredictable, and largely dusty spiritual path for long enough now to recognize the changes and imperatives when they come - and for the most part, they have come like this, of the blue.

What immediately fits is the fact that contemplative solitude, for me, is actually easier to find in the city. Having lived my entire life in the fishbowls of small towns, where I cannot step outside my door or buy a bag of carrots without running into someone who knows me, the anonymity of the city is a huge relief. It creates a sense of freedom that is impossible for me here. Perhaps because of living so many years in the country, close to nature, solitude -- for me -- is not dependent on silence, but on being removed from the obligation to talk, interact, and plan. And yet, being a social creature and a moderate extrovert, and knowing that my husband – the opposite - likes to take off for long periods of photographic exploration on his own, I’ve been a little worried about having to deal with too much solitude during an entire month of urban living. “Use it,” I hear now. “It’s a gift.”

This morning there’s much that I don’t understand. Is this simply an emotional reaction to the Merton I’ve been reading – the kind of excited, creative impulse I often feel when reading or seeing something that inspires me, but which afterwards reveals itself as just that – a kind of steamed-up excitement that quickly evaporates when I steps out into the daily reality of life? Or is it the real thing, which, if I follow it out, will lead me somewhere I’m meant to go? And in that case, what was that decision to pick up Merton during Holy Week? How do we ever know these things? All I know is that certain books have leapt off shelves into my hands for years, and changed me, and changed the course of my life and my thinking. What I suspect is that in this case, choosing to read this particular volume of Merton again was a sign that I was entering into a psychological place that was receptive to contemplation. What I didn’t do was connect it to the upcoming travel. And whether that happens or not depends on my assent to the invitation.

Fat Tuesday

Fromagerie Fritz Kaiser, Noyan, QC

Since it's Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday...i.e., the day before Lent begins and traditionally the last chance to stuff ourselves with fat and sugar, here are some photos from Fromagerie Fritz Kaiser in Noyan, Quebec, where we stopped today after doing some errands.

This fromagerie has won many awards, and we agree: they make some of the best cheeses (from both cow and goat's milk) we've ever tasted. It's just north of the US-Canadian border, and we used to stop there often when visiting our family on Isle la Motte, the northernmost of the Lake Champlain islands. Recently, the fromagerie has built a new store on the front of the facility where the cheese is made. The barns and the cows are right beside it. The prices for the cheeses are much less there than in Montreal stores, and you can taste anything you want to try.

In the foreground, above, rounds of goat brie and chevrechon, a soft surface-ripened goat's milk cheese.

This is Le Douanier, which won the Canadian Grand Prix in 2004. I can't even begin to tell you how delicious it is. It's somewhat similar to Morbier; this is what Fritz Kaiser says about it:

A semi-soft cheese with a washed and brushed rind, Douanier is left to ripen for more than nine weeks. The edible vegetable ash layer that runs through the centre of the wheel symbolizes the Quebec-US border close to where the cheese is made. With its earthy aroma and organic flavour, Douanier tempts the palate with a hint of nuts and green apple.

OK. Now we're going off to the cathedral's annual Shrove Tuesday pancake-and-sausage supper. And tomorrow evening I'll be singing the Allegri Miserere, and the ashes will be on my forehead, not in my cheese.

A new relief print

I've wanted to attempt an "Annunciation" for some time, and have been working on a version for a relief print for quite a while. Several years ago I looked at a number of artists' interpretations as I was thinking about it, and my eventual version is loosely based on the Cortona Annunciation by Fra Angelico, painted in 1433-34.

I thought you might be interested in seeing some of the stages in the process.

Here's my original drawing from the painting, done back in 2012.

I got this far before getting discouraged and unsure how to take it further, and put the drawings away in a drawer.

In December of this year, I found the drawings and started working on them again. The figures had already been considerably simplified and moved. I eliminated Gabriel's halo, gave Mary a big one, and put her on a bench, below him. Mary's submissive acceptance has always been presented as a model of faith and behavior for women. However I very much doubt if a young unmarried girl of the time would have reacted to a message like this, delivered by a male angel appearing without warning, except with fear and great ambivalence: qualities that have rarely been depicted in artistic interpretations. I wanted to try to emphasize that in the gestures, the relationship of the figures, and in their expressions. On the other hand, because of the crudity of the relief-print process, it's difficult to show subtlety in faces, so whatever I did would have to be stylized.

I also worked a lot on adding some detail to the feathers, the angel's gown, and especially to Mary's dress, which is inspired here by traditional Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery.

The image had to be flipped, right-to-left, and I worked on ways to include a graphic background behind the figures that would help unify the composition. Somewhere around here I decided to allow the figures to appear in front of the final frame in two places on the right and left. At this point I also had to decide on a final size: the block is about 8" (22 cm) square.

Finally it was time to transfer the drawing to the linoleum and cut the block. The transfer was difficult because of the details, and the cutting took several days. I worked only an hour or two at a time, because my hand, neck and shoulder get tired, increasing the danger of a mistake, a slip that could ruin the block, or of cutting myself. I had wanted to leave myself plenty of latitude for the more serendipitous aspects of block-carving too: the particular quality of a carved line can't be duplicated in drawing, only anticipated. Also, I'm never sure how many "extra" lines I'm going to leave in the mostly-blank areas, following the forms and adding to the sculptural aspect of the final image. The final appearance of the angel's skirt was created almost entirely during the carving process itself; so were the feathers and the angel's coiffure.

And here's the final print. I'm contemplating a two-color version, but for now, I'm happy to see this one come into being. A lot was learned, and I'm glad I stuck with it even though there were struggles along the way.

(There's an edition of 20, available in my shop.)

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.