Get Thee to a Nunnery

     This weekend I spent three days at the Benedictine Sisters Monastery in Mt. Angel. I've been trying to succeed on a Daniel fast (raw food) for the past few months and have failed repeatedly, so last week Phil Gazely suggested I take a personal retreat to a monastery to get in tune with God and give it another go. If you know me, you know I'm slightly obsessed with monasticism, so of course the idea of spending three days in a monastery amidst sounds of a perfectly pitched compline choir sounded like a fantastic escape.
     I learned a LOT this weekend, most of it having little to do with fasting, ironically. Also, it was uncomfortable. Really. The whole experience was nothing like I expected. It was unsettling sitting around with so much time on my hands in so much quiet. It took all of me not to bolt out the door every hour on the hour. Instead I tried to intentionally sit with my discomfort and learn all I could in the tension of silence. 
     I'll pull out a few highlights from my journal for you guys. Feel free to ask me more about it. Also, it's pretty long and most of you won't have the patience to read it, but patience is what most of it is about, so read on.



On the Friday before I left, Phil gave me a verse that he felt was from God for me. It was Exodus 14:14. "The Lord will fight for you; you need only be still."



5/6/11
     "So much is running through my head. I went to prayer with the sisters in a beautiful chapel overlooking the greenery of their grounds. It was rainy outside, the kind of rain that is being interrupted by little bursts of sunshine. Inside we were praying and singing hymns, hymns that I'm sure the sisters have read a thousand times. But the cold, ritualistic feel of prayers were contrasted by the warmth in the eyes of each one of the nuns. It sounds cheesy, but it's true. Each one has greeted me with a kind smile and an extended hand.
    "I have SO much time on my hands. I feel like I could commit to anything and talk to anyone right now because I'm not restricted by schedules and to-do's. I hopped in the shower after watching a VHS in their vintage library on Thomas Merton (which was incredible) and it hit me (yet again)--rushing and busyness and excessive entertainment are truly wastes of a life. I've learned more in the last four hours of being here in stillness than I have in three months! I've been bombarded with concepts and information the last few months, tons of great ones, but nothing has soaked in or transformed me--and that's what's been so frustrating. Revelation is abundant in the environment I live in, which is good, but it's almost turned into an instant gratification type of thing, where I grab onto a 'good idea' but a few months later I'm left with zero transformation. Not to mention the fact that everything is so busy. There's never enough time to tune in and seek after transformation. Our lives are noisy and we glorify busyness. It's disgusting, really. What am I making of my life by trading true relationship or silence with busyness? To get meaningless crap accomplished, crap that has zero impact on the greater world around me? To what end is my busyness? Nothing. Loneliness, if anything. It leaves me empty handed. I want to live without busyness and stuff. But the busyness and stuff is so freaking enticing. Busyness equates productivity in our culture and I think that's such a lie. If anything, it's a huge distraction. Busyness drowns out the irritating cries of my soul for depth and vitality that do not come easily in this shallow age we live in . Stuff: food, entertainment, spending--it passes time and distracts me from my soul, whose cries I've been diminishing in value, but are only becoming more urgent as the days progress. I can't shut up the cries of my heart anymore--it creaks and groans like a piece of wood buckling under too much weight. What will hydrate it again?

5/6/11--[an entry regarding gluttony] "...I think that's this fast is for--to break the chains of gluttony and sloth. What happens when I weed out the main source of overconsumption in my life? Overconsumption ceases. So does rushing and busyness--rushing to stuff food in my mouth or frantically grab the last bit of food with my hands. My tunnel vision toward food is shut off. Slownesss rushes in to fill it's place. Settledness, the sense of time. No longer am I frantic, I'm calm. No longer am I afraid of not getting filled, for I am filled by being underfilled.  An interesting paradox. "

5/7/11--"I met someone today. An old dude. Today I met Sid. He creeped me out at first, because his eyes would kind of glaze over when he spoke and he dramatically shift his weight from side to side. I didn't know why he acted that way until he started sharing more about his story. He introduced himself to me by asking if I'd been to the monastery before. I said no. He said he had, six times now, that he comes once a year. Then he got into why. Apparently, when he was eighteen, he got in a car accident. He hit the side of a bridge, wasn't wearing his seat belt and was launched through the windshield, skidding across rocks down a hill. As he was telling the story he kept saying, '...and I went out of my body'. I kept wondering what he meant, so I finally interrupted him to ask and he said, 'Oh, into the light. The tunnel." At this point I wondered if I was talking to a crazy. But he started telling me how he was suspended in light and felt nothing but sense of being pulled three directions--toward Good, toward Evil, and toward himself, back to Earth. He went back, obviously, out of his choice, I don't know. But he went on to tell me that due to that experience he had a myriad of questions about faith and God, so he made the choice to go to seminary--he said it just made things worse and things were still pretty unresolved. Well, twenty years later at thirty-eight, he gets married. He said that's when everything 'exploded'. He hit a wall of depression, hopelessness and despair. He didn't know why it hit at that time, that time that was supposed to be the most fulfilling time in our lives--when we marry another person. Instead of running from the marriage, him and his wife spent years together in counseling trying to work things through. He said it's been a process, and he's only now beginning to understand the questions he had back when he was eighteen. Now when he comes to Mt. Angel, he keeps in mind the meditation practices he's learned, but he lets whatever happens, happen. He doesn't judge any of it. He just lets it be. He said God's speaking theree things to him already, "In Him, with him, as him." He said he keeps hearing it, over and over and he's just going with the flow for now. He had some really profound things to say, actually and was a very sharp, very deep man. Although his shifty mannerisms made me think otherwise, at first. After he shared his story, he asked me about mine. I told him a bit, about what I'm working through. A lot of it was similar to what he said he was going through. He said I'm in a good place now, working all of this out so young because i'm getting a strong foundation. Which I hear a lot. But makes me wonder...when is this kind of 'crisis' supposed to happen? When you're twenty-five or when you're fifty? It tends to be either one of those age ranges, I've noticed. I asked myself, as far as life lessons, am I exceptional and and he's behind? Or am I too early and he's on time? Or are we both just okay where we're at? Probably the latter."

5/8/11--"My attention span is horrific. My mind has probably wandered to fifteen different places just while reading one chapter of Romans. This will take practice, this slowness thing. This meditative life. I live in a time where I can be entertained by anything, anytime of day, it's at my fingertips no matter where I am.  The mark of a peculiar people in this generation will be those who can sit in silence and be okay. Those who can leave their smart phones at home and not have their brain short circuit. Those who reject busyness and say no to noise even it if means others will call them lazy, narcissistic, anti-social or unproductive. Will we take our 'busyness', rushing and to-do lists to the grave? No. When you're dead "you don't take nothing with you but your soul," as John Lennon sang. And our souls thrive on depth, relationship and wonder at simplicity and things not made by man. Oh, God, help me to be a person of slowness. And may your word be my greatest escape."

5/8/11--"I took a walk through the cemetery earlier. I was just walking and thinking/praying. As I was praying, I began to repent. Nothing super heavy or anything like that, but still things of importance. I repented of something that surprised me. When you take walks outside, you're kind of hit in the face with how big God is. How untameable and wild. And I realized that my Christian life consists of whining that God isn't at my fingertips every time I pray--that I'm not 'hearing him' that I'm not getting a word for someone, that I'm not getting some type of vision. God is bigger than those things. And he's not going to show up whenever I snap my arrogant fingers. I prayed he would reshape my thinking to that of worshiping and praying as an act of submitting to him, not as an act of getting something out of him. Most saints and contemplatives had quiet times consisting of silence and slow meditation--not weeping and demanding and striving. Although emotions have their place, they're not the essence of prayer, or the essence of God. He is a God worthy of honor and worthy of us waiting on him. To think he has to show up every time we do something spiritual is so naive. I prayed he would turn my relationship with him into a silent union with Him. Not an experience."

I learned a lot while I was there and wondered at even more. Such as: are some monks avoiding intimacy by choosing to take the vows of an order? How many Catholics will go to heaven as Christians see it? Catholics pray to Saints, and I also see monks pulling from Zen thought and other types of religions--Am I worshiping the same God they are? Am I called to a contemplative life? If I'm not called to a monastery, how can I cultivate a contemplative life in my day-to-day? How can I make the Eucharist more sacred? How can I get my hands on every Thomas Merton, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Francis of Assisi book ever written? And on and on.

Being at the monastery made feel intellectually at home. I can't wait to go again.