photo by contemplify
“The day before [Roger Ebert] passed away, he wrote me a note: “This is all an elaborate hoax.” I asked him, “What’s a hoax?” And he was talking about this world, this place. He said it was all an illusion. I thought he was just confused. But he was not confused. He wasn’t visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can’t even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once.― Chaz Ebert (Roger’s Wife)
Subtle Sacraments
Loved ones are speaking their minds courageously. Loved ones are tweeting mindlessly. We scroll on. The screen is the communal fire we sit around for friendship, storytelling, and imagining a way ahead. Screens offer us connection and possibility. This new Promethean fire does not warm us without consequences. This same glowing screen lulls us into self-forgetfulness and spiritual malnourishment. Americans average 10 hours a day locked in a staring contest with a screen. All bets are on the screen for the win.
For now I am not glancing downward at my phone, but inward. Where should I cast my gaze? Elders are few, leadership is lacking, and the greedy political dogs don’t mind if you wag their tails. Don’t tell anyone, but a mystic who forgot he was dead dropped me a note that read, “From now on brother, we all stand on our own feet.”* I step out the front door to be mentored by a bird on a wire. We need sacraments of a new order, not to replace the load-bearing sacraments of the lineages that hold us, but to don the contemplative robes knitted by our very souls. Subtle sacraments are waiting to be let in.
Subtle sacraments surround us. They are conscious movements within daily life to crack a window so the Spirit can blow where it will. Sacraments, ceremony, and rituals are necessary bedrooms for the soul to have a dalliance with the Divine; to remember itself to the whole, to reclaim its unique post in the unfolding Mystery. We must learn to drink in Mystery by concocting our own subtle sacraments with the chalice of our lives to enlarge our connection. So let’s hold one another’s gaze, toast our gleanings, amuse our misfortunes, and celebrate our subtle sacraments together.
When I get up in the morning I putter around the kitchen. I make coffee for my wife and prepare breakfast for the kids while I open up a window so a subtle sacrament can slip in. I put on an album in hopes of reaching their thirsty ears, stretching their spirits, and calling forth a grace not yet recognized. Yo-Yo Ma. Michael Franti. Gillian Welch. Greg Brown. All of these folks serenade our table while I fry up eggs or pour the cereal. This is a classic sacrament for members of the Kitchen Music Society of Sorrow and Delight. This past month I’ve lucked out. Clem Snide has been pulling up a chair to our morning table and sharing a melodious invocation.
More than once I have put the spatula down and wept into my eggs. There is a cosmic truth that emerges on this album and it blesses our breakfast. I yearn for music like this. Music that connects me to our rooted oneness while remaining grounded in everyday incarnational realities. Goodness, Mystery, death, and discovery with a side of toast. The album Forever Just Beyond by Clem Snide resonates over the morning, echoing the truths I’ve read from the pages of masters; Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, Zen Master Dōgen, and John O’Donohue. An audible eternality enters through the linear time machine of routine and plops down for chat just between us kitchen mystics. A subtle sacrament.
Music is best served fresh without wordy indulgences that fail to capture its essence. Forgive my indulgence. The opening track ‘Roger Ebert’ relays the story of film critic Roger Ebert’s dying words (quoted in the header) and the thin space of his departure. Ebert’s turn towards death opened a window of liminality, dethroning perceptions absurdly crowned and discovering a “vastness that can’t be contained”. As a listener ‘Roger Ebert’ is the first step into a threshold of that vastness, and you journey through it in each song that follows until Clem Snide drops you off at home with the parting words,
“After we stumble
We’ll find a part
Our story told
Please go and tell your own
Try not to tumble
The path is dark
And sometimes steep
Too steep for anybody here
But us with no choice
But to trust”
I fret about the lives of my children and which enchanted forests will be charred before they get a chance to build a tree fort in their thickets. It is a steep path that requires trust. So I spill the beans of God’s naked frolicking in our midst. I teach them songs in the rhythm of their beating hearts. We process the suffering planet. We paint pictures of unicorns drying their laundry by the sun. We laugh at jokes that have never been told. We wipe away remorseful tears that follow acid tongue remarks held in arms of forgiveness. We are kind to a chicken who pecks at our toes and whisper sweet nothings to our tomato plants. I read them poetry while my spirit weeps. I play them Clem Snide’s Forever Just Beyond to seed a vastness they can’t even imagine.
I want to teach them how to see beyond the virtual, to see the Christ-soaked world. I want them to feel life vibrating from the nuanced kisses of the Beloved. When subtlety is lost, so is the sacramentalization of this life
A question for you, dear listener, to raise at your breakfast table — Where do you see a window you can open for a subtle sacrament to slip into your day?
*Thomas Merton Quote from his last lecture in Bangkok
The Quiet Mind
“The most powerful prayer, one wellnigh omnipotent, and the worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is. To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own.”
– Meister Eckhart
Contemplative friend, the practice of the quiet mind galvanizes my rhythm of life. This is why I meditate, read poetry, and go for as many walks as a day can hold. The circuit board of the head, heart, and body needs a current to realign them into one charge so the soul can animate the day’s activities. In Eckhartian lingo, this is the merging of my will with the Divine will. In this union of wills, I have found that words and silence perpetually exchange the roles of both the tortoise and the hare in the practice of quieting of the mind. It can be perplexing to say the least. And like all contemplative practices worth their salt, I find it useful to reflect on its meaning, on the roundabout ways words and silence quicken–or deaden–the quieting of the mind.
A quiet mind is not dollar store spirituality. A quiet mind is not cheap inaction. I saw her slap confusion’s face just the other day. I have observed a quiet mind blush under tender attention. A quiet mind thrives in low light, among the morels before the elms leaf out. That is where I am calling us to forage, in the voiceless forest where the bloom is in waiting. Silence paces itself among the trees, knows where life is seeded and waters the ground lavishly. It is also true that the lush landscape of a quiet mind can retreat into a sardonic graveyard. And it is a vile thing to watch undead bodies dig their own burial plots spewing high calorie, essence-free words.
Right now my mouth is brimming with chewed up words. I hold them back, praising the unspoken. I must disperse this crowd of words, but how? I cannot risk swallowing a meaty word nor can I spit them out in any logical order. An innocent silence turns fugitive. The words I am searching for are feckless outlaws hiding out between back molars. Some words just won’t share the spoils. So this quiet mind is paradoxically imprisoned by words in a stubborn pursuit of freedom. The word ‘insouciance’ is lounging on my tongue like it is a beach towel, snoozing through my attempts to loosen figurative gems. The sequestered words are insubordinate Lollards, dallying in a hot tub of saliva and stubbing out cigars on my uvula.
Words are heavy weights. A pregnant speaker can not safely lift these tiny barbells made of iron flesh and dusted with cinnamon. When I find a new one on the street, I brush it off and pop it in my mouth. A nasty habit, but in my defense I can’t resist the tasty zing. I aspire to build wordsmith muscles to flex when called upon. These convivial moments are as likely as Lois Lane recognizing that Clark Kent is Superman in bifocals.
My efforts for right speech have forced a beard to overgrow on my face to collect the harum-scarum words that gambol out my yapper. My mustache gets in the way of kissing my wife, which I deem a higher calling than wordplay, so I shave it off. Now when I eat, distasteful words fall out and stain my shirt. So it goes. I’ve heard of word-drunk, but I am a sloppy word drunk. Too inebriated to know that each word I drink in, swish around, and swallow has a sobriety of their own accord. This parched body craves absorptive words to sustain this play. I seek to slice through the macramé pinata, feathering cliches about the air with their unspoke candied essence until they drop dead on the dumb ground. Did you know that cliches will not float in the currents of culture? They go the ways of stones, but for the poet, they hang ten on a moth’s rump in flight to an explosive metaphor beyond the azure horizon.
Words are not all we have, we have silence. Silence and speech are eternal officemates. Speech dictates every obnoxious thought aloud, silence is the receptionist who takes copious notes with invisible ink. The Desert Fathers and Mothers understood this and took great caution with their silver tongues. I am lazier than that. Or less serious. I am smitten by the wordplay of Meister Eckhart, but look where that got him. In a moment I can take the precision of words seriously and then mock them with a reckless word party the next. As someone wise once said, ‘Silence is the language of God’, but I’d bet a two dollar bill that a loon call is God’s second language. Both words and silence hold the potential to quiet the mind.
I care most about occurs before words take sound and what happens after they land in open ears. The responsibility of speech is salty; on wounds it stings and on sweets it intensifies. And between us humans, is it not true that we incessantly craft, deliver, and read love letters doused in unsaintly expressions? It is a daily conundrum for me. There is a silent intent and impact of words that bind the speaker and listener in knotty ways. When the impact is foul, a quiet mind can untether intentions from speech and beg forgiveness. In such instances silence calls our words back in to have a word with them.
The pickle is this — I am not my words, but they play me on TV. I am not my silence but it speaks to me. Let me not confuse the two for the ground of my soul. My soul shares the ground with God, but is not God. The quiet mind strolls about freely on this sacred ground. This ground is where I begin, speak, contemplate, and die though I may not always know it. In a moment of quickening devotion I see the practice of the quiet mind unfold. It begins by reading the words of God in reality, an unsayable mystical inbreaking, and I am free to forsake the reader for the balm of God’s breath in mine.
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