Midsummer Retreating: St. John the Baptist and Interior Hospitality

I'm taking some time this month to reflect this month. Just a week or so to reconnect with God. I'm not going anywhere..I retreat best at home with my elf-child and my inspiring husband (though Luba is sometimes less than retreat worthy). 

It's the season of St. John. The days are long and bright, the moon is our friend and the nights - though brief, are refreshing. The Season of St. John is a woody season, and earth-season, a wild time of transition for many of us..'He must increase, I must decrease'.

The Baptist is the saint of transitions and roles - defined so completely by his place between the Prophets and the Messiah, Old and New - the Forerunner to Christ.

In this retreat time I'm crafting a rule of life: slowly, gently, building Christ more intimately into my days. The first stage belongs especially to St. John - the stage of roles and relationships. 

I am reflecting on my roles, my relationships with others, and the ways in which I can nourish them while nurturing my own interior life as well.

St. John spent his life in the wilderness. The 'Angel of the Desert,' he is nourish on fasting and on the earth and the Sun, only from a life a part can he touch deeply the people he loves and live out his purpose in life.

For me the wilderness - though less vast and less wild - is also a healing place. Mine is fuller, with more companionship, more noise, but still a place that becomes for me a haven of reflection..a place to put down roots and drink in the whispers of God.

Lenten Icons: St. Moses the Prophet

"None of the angels, but the dark and fallen one

was willing; took up arms and with deadly intent

approached the one to whom he had been sent.

 But again he rattled away, backwards, and up 

to the heavens he scream: I can't."** 

Moses. The man who talks intimately with God. In a season of intensified prayer, he is our guide. Radiant-faced, argumentative Moses. The friend of God. God has a interesting way of picking friends. He does it as I can only wish to - see and know and love. They are so tender together, these jealous ones - the Lord and His beloved.

In the icon, Moses has such soulful eyes. Holding onto the law he gazes into the bush, as though they are once again caught up in that eternal conversation:

"I walk forever toward you

with a single mind and strong;

for who would I be and who would you

if we didn't get along?"*

I am always almost sad for Moses, who wandered for 40 years in the desert and never touched the promised land, but what would he have done there, settled in the land of milk and honey? His role was to guide the people home; to draw from the wilderness holy wisdom. And I can never quite morn him, whom Death feared to touch. Taken up like Enoch and Elijah to watch and wait for Easter.

"And from this well-ordered house,

he called the soul forth to rise, up! to recount

the many common things of a friendship deeply laid."**

* Rainer Maria Rilke: The Book of Hours

** Rainer Maria Rilke: Moses' Death 

 

Lenten Icons

The Lamenting Virgin is an ideal companion for the season of Lent. She mourns as we do - but deeper, fuller. Her empty arms wrapped around the Son she longs so much to hold. The Mother mourns what cannot be - it is a loss of something she never really had - for who can hold all of God? Strange to think that once she did. Once she had a child, a tiny son who nestled in that lonely space, but the dreams and hopes that mothers share, of the sweet potentiality in each child, that she never really had. He was something else entirely: "I had only streams of milk or tears to offer, and you were ever so much more than me." Something un-holdable, something set apart. And I think she knew, even then, that her arms would always be both empty and full.

My pain has been perfected and fills me up...

You became great,

and then you burst the rims of my heart

as a smarting too stark. .

no longer can I give to you

birth.

(Rainer Maria Rilke. From The Life of the Virgin Mary) 

Monday Reflections: Notes from Meditations on the Tarot

I.

The Magician 

The Anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot is not writing a book on divination. This is not a book for the reader of the cards, and the reflections are only on the major arcana. It is a book which uses the images of the cards to bring us into a deeper relationship to the world of symbol and faith. 'A journey into  Christian Hermeticism' - the author calls it, and what is Christian Hermeticism but a journey itself, an ever growing relationship.

In the first card, we're invited to meet Symbolism itself in the form of the Magician, who like symbols themselves "conceal and reveal their sense at one and the same time."

The magician is linked by the author to "the rapport of personal effort and of spiritual reality" - the card that opens the door to understanding the others. 

                          Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play;

                          make every yoke you have accepted easy and every burden that you 

                          carry light!

Seen that way, it's obvious we need a magician of some sort - we need to bend the exterior life to reflect the will, shape it, as a magician does. It is not an easy task though, each person has a burden which seems impossibly heavy; but Christ has called us to do the same, with his own magic lifting the yoke until it is easy to bear. The key our anonymous friend gives is in disinterested concentration - focusing not on the burden, but on the One who makes burden's light and there, concentrating 'without effort' on the absorbing beauty of Christ, our work becomes the serious, joyful play of the child.

I'm finding as I read these reflections, that I love the quiet of them, the abundant symbolism, and the different and completely non-divinatory view of the cards. It's a way of looking at them I'd never really explored before, and it's a blessing to have the chance now.

All Saint's

 

How Halloween-y are my potions!!! And my 'Apothic' wines!

All Hallow's Eve is passed; and with it the easy, crisp days of October. We had a delightfully Halloween-y month: a spooky, local, harvest meal at my favorite cafe (just my husband and I); a Halloween short-story reading at the library; and last night, an amazing little bit of trick-or-treating with Petka as a Matryoshka that ended at my in-law's tiny library, where my father-in-law (a local historian) told haunted tales.

Petka and Da made delightful Matryoshkas

 

It's a dreary All Saint's Day this morning. We woke late and warm, and lazed through a morning of creamy coffee, Stromboli, and all the anticipatory joys the new month brings. 

I should have waited to frost them today, it got just a bit dry looking overnight

..but Saints and photographs are so forgiving.

I've baked Saint's cakes for the altar today (and later for our mouths!): Orange, Cardamom, and Pistachio with an orange-y cream cheese frosting. The just feel autumnal. Tomorrow I'll bake Soul Cake's for our beloved dead, and for the Sad People only Yarrow can see. I like to pray a Rosary while mixing the batter, trying to remember all those who ought to be remembered..but today the celebration is just rest and celebration. I can greet my saints with gifts of cake and cream.

Seth made me spooky..but only in the photo. I looked pretty lame last night

 Blessed Hallowmas all!

Reflections: Saint and Pope

I wonder if some of us American Catholics are going to lose our fondness for St. Francis during this pontificate. So many bloggers and Catholic media personalities are tending toward the "I love him but.." line regarding Pope Francis, that I think we're going to discover just how much we don't actually love the Franciscan spirit when it's lived out right before our eyes. I know I often don't.  St. Francis was God's fool, and that foolish, full-hearted sort of love is terrifying, challenging, overwhelming; it leads us, like St. Francis himself, to strip naked before the whole world and fling ourselves as babes into the arms of God.  Francis embraced martyrdom, poverty, pain, and misunderstanding in an attempt to walk after Christ as a living icon.

 "[Francis] is great because he is everything. He is a man who wants to do things, wants to build, he founded an order and its rules, he is an itinerant and a missionary, a poet and a prophet, he is mystical. He found evil in himself and rooted it out. He loved nature, animals, the blade of grass on the lawn and the birds flying in the sky. But above all her loved people, children, old people, women. He is the most shining example of ..agape"*



Like Francis, this pope is making himself comfortable naked before God and man. He's not trying to show anything, I think, so much as he's simply being himself before God, and God's poor sinner before man. He's decided that he fears being misunderstood and misrepresented less than he fears that each person he interacts with will not see the love of God in him. And so he embraces everyone with that holy promiscuity Francis himself was know for. Every person, not every thing. And the distinction is always there for him. Pope Francis does not seem careful in his words in the thoughtful way a Thomas More, a Thomas Aquinas, or a Benedict XVI might be, his words are careful of their own free will, because they come from a soul already defined, and they are careless because he's chosen to allow them to be. Because this is his calling: to rebuild the Church, not as merely the guardian of morals, but as the true home of each and every soul. And we are a world that misreads careful words as cold and unloving. We need a chance to come home first - to be like that poor, wild boy in the parable, who's father ask questions another day; after the party, after the joyful embrace, after he's fed his starving boy, bathed him, clothed him, and loved him back into safety. 

 "I will show the way, He said. Follow Me and you will find the Father and you will all be his children and he will take delight in you. Agape, the love of each of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of Salvation and of the Beatitudes."*

I am often uncomfortable with those formed by St. Francis. I'm torn between the desire to imitated and the knowledge that this is not my call, not my charism. But I love the squirming sense it gives me, that love really is the answer. And that love doesn't require niceness so much as holiness. And all of us, from the crustiest old imitators of Padre Pio, to the all embracing daughters of Mary Magdalene are called to be holy.

* both quotations are from Pope Francis' interview with Eugenio Scalfari


.

Dormition

 "You are fruit snatched out of our life,

a berry hanging round and sweet;

simply let us taste how you melt

on the tongue of eternity.

For we remain blind down here where you left us.

And each place here desires solace and peace.

Grant us at least grace and courage,

since seeing down here has ceased."

~Rainer Maria Rilke

The fast is ended. And so too, it feels, is the summer. Seeing my breath in the cool morning air and planning a cake to celebrate the Mother's return to her Son, I can't help but feel sad to see the end and the beginning. To feel change so obvious in the world around me. 

We have berries, round and sweet, hanging all around us to fill the Virgin's cake with the flavors of life. Blackberries growing wild along the drive, behind the garden, and right up to the stream. 

"Who would have thought that until her coming

the entire heavens were incomplete?"

 

Late Summer Spirituality: Dormition Fast in the Dying Season

The leaves are still green and high, the tomatoes are just starting to ripen. The pigs are heavy, muddy beasts -eating and sleeping their days away. I've a screen of herbs drying above the sleeping stove, and sunlight streaming in through every window; but the nights are bright with autumn stars and my bare-feet are unhappy, running through early morning chill to feed the animals. It's a good season for the fast - vegetables everywhere. I can make a meal without leaving the yard, and watching the summer die feels Marian in a way - a bright, perfect passing - beautiful and too soon.

I'm mourning the season early this year, because August tastes like September now, and because my birthday feels momentous this time around. I can't help hovering over all the things I should have done - almost as much as I anticipate the things yet to be, my "memories of the future" that haunt these magic days. August is a month for magic - a month of otherland wanderings and paths that may not come again..paths leading the Virgin each year back to her Son and me to the hidden places of wood and stream where elderberries laugh under the fading light.

Reflections: Prayers to a Lowly God and The Sickness unto Death

I learned to pray from Rainer Maria Rilke.

Years after learning the form of things as a little child, prayer came to me all out of the night, in a scrap of paper: "Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now." In those words I found my voice and began a love affair with the One Who wanted to hear.

I learned to see from Rilke as he watched Italian Madonnas nurse their growing sons..as he traced the shadows under Icon eyes and mourned the loneliness of God, waiting among His candles and scented air..ready to greet "all the immense images in me .. and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods" as friends I have known and seen before.

But I learned to live from Soren Kierkegaard, who held my hand and whispered that it is good to stand alone, that "every life preoccupied with being like others is a wasted life, a lost life." And it's his kind voice - uncertain and full of haunted dreams - that guides me as I move in this month of quiet retreat.  As I remove myself from groups that weighed me down with their refusal to allow growth, that offer comforting pats of affirmation but balk at building charity. 

I'm learning as I grow that I've less and less patience with the habit of making peace for the sake of avoiding uncomfortable disagreements. And in this Kierkegaard is my guide, though I am blessed in ways he was not - with a family to love me though the arguments, and friends to smile on my hopeless dreams and over-reaching efforts.  In August I'll hold both my mentors in reserve, and reach forward, to one I've only met in passing - Gregory of Nyssa, who's Life of Moses sits beside my bed, waiting. I've read bits of him in Kathleen Norris - we share a love of the quotidian, of darkness, and of the God who can be found in both. I'm looking forward to learning more.

Believing in Hidden Things

The three who wander among our Birches aren’t ghosts, the never haunt; and my daughter greets them laughingly on bright spring afternoons “Hi Patrick, hi friend!” So I never worry. But I do believe in proper ghosts.

Not ghosts with unfinished business who wander looking for some lost path to heaven, nor ghosts who don’t realize they’ve died and so ‘refuse to move on’. Both ideas seem contrary to God’s way of letting men live. My ghosts are always permitted, sometimes invited by God to visit their loved ones - either from heaven or from purgatory, to bring some good about - like saints who appear to aid us, like my three relics guarding our little home; like the holy souls in purgatory - who never sleep, and so welcome the chance to wake us early in the morning. There are other ‘ghosts’ as well, mere impressions that hover when the soul has long gone to it’s eternal home, remembrances of a life that was so strong the world is marked forever by it - so strong the place itself does not forget. But they’re not true ghosts, just images and reflections. And of course I believe the devil does as he will with the souls he’s collected, sending them out as he is permitted, to haunt and make miserable and misdirect if at all possible.

As a Catholic, belief is free within bounds, and anything that doesn’t contradict revealed Truth is open to absorb. I absorb a good deal - and ghosts are both my favorite and least favorite of these mysterious beings. What do you think of them?

Wesołego Alleluja!

Tasting cake batter before the Vigil - She doesn't have to fast!

 

 

 

 

 

Święconka basket..Holy Saturday

  

The Cake - a lesson in making the best out of failure..

 

 

 

Easter morning!

Wesołego Alleluja!

Ash Wednesday

Today, the sun is bright and warm, the chickens are out pecking, and we are diving into the Lenten routine. I am trying to fill the day with activity - to distract from fasting, trying to teach my soul to breathe peacefully in prayer.

One discipline is daily writing - something I often ‘cheat’ at with quick edits and half-hearted attempts. Today, with my cup of blackest coffee beside me, I’m committed - drafting poems that are half prayers and editing long - abandoned articles for freelance submission.

I’m keeping Christ before me in this season. On the table, on the wall, and within my mind. I’m trying to focus through the noisy moments and grow in all aspects of my vocation - each nourishing the other in this season of retreat.

Winter Habits

It’s snowing again. The weathermen promise freezing rain along the coast, but we are not-quite-coastal enough, I think.

Everything I’ve planned for the day - except walking to collect the mail, which is looking unlikely at this point, is done. I’m enjoying the peace of winter quiet. Seth and Yarrow enjoy the quiet as well. She's been inside pretty consistently, though we did bundle up to sand the driveway before the snow began. Seth has been sketching and starting up a tumblr page: The Beauty Project. He's uncertain about tumblr so far.  I've been reading a bit of Michael Pollen's In Defense of Food, drinking tea, and wasting time on pinterest. Yarrow's bushia visited on the weekend of the storm, and managed to sneak in some quality time before and after the blizzard. Yarrow was grateful for the attention, she's a severely neglected child.

And while it’s quite, I’d like to request prayers for our dear Pope Benedict XVI, who has decided to step down at the end of February. I’ll miss seeing his delightful smile and resting in his calm leadership, but I’m glad he will have the chance to retire to a life of peace and prayer. 

Andrzejki

Tomorrow is the beginning of the new liturgical year; yesterday was the feast of St. Andrew, the end of the old season. I love St. Andrew’s eve, but tend to forget him on his day; the eve is full of mystery and hints of the future, the day is a reminder that all things pass away. On the eve of St. Andrew (Andrzejki) tradition calls for dripping wax into a bowl of water by moonlight and reading the shapes to find out what will be. Dreams are important on St. Andrew’s as well, and I’m grateful to have had good ones this year, it gives me a good feeling for the coming year. My dreams have been rambling and uncertain in November, they leave me unrested and unprepared for dawn; but Saint Andrew’s eve brought hope and peace.

Thanksgiving

Tattoos, Headscaves, and Long Halls

We attend mass at the Basilica in town. It’s a big, beautiful old gray-stone church. Light, open, and Eastery. The early morning mass is the Extraordinary form. I prefer our liturgy to the novus ordo, primarily because I can’t resist the over-abundant ritual, but also becuase, like Flannery O Connor,"I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music." . Our priest is a dual-rite Byzantine , and that is another benefit to me, as I miss the Liturgy of John Chrysostom.

       One thing I love about old churches are the long aisles lined in stained glass. I like the sound of my shoes on the tile as I walk. I like the saints with their votives watching from the walls. Visually, the church raises me up, even when Yarrow is being decidedly unpious, or when I’m too tired or preoccupied to hear the words from the altar. Our mass community attracts me visually as well. I love watching them trickle in. The Large and Confusing Family in twos and threes, the Somber Family already at prayer, the exuberant family, the fashionable couple, the mournful couple, the man with the lawnmower tattoo just above his receding hairline. The variety is thrilling, and so is the common enthusiasm.

Most of the women wear headscarves, at least part of the time, and it delights me to not be an oddity, to seethe diversity of scarves come in. I covet some of them, and simply admire others. I like the mystery the scarf gives to the wearer. I love the whole drama of the liturgy, and my own part in it as well

Peacocks for eternity

       The world once knew once that peacock flesh would not decay. Death could hardly touch something so beautiful. Because of this, the peacock is a symbol of the resurrection, of eternal life. A thousand eyes watching God forever. Peacocks are good luck. I once saw one standing beside the on-ramp of I-84, watching the road I followed. His tail barely seemed cumbersome, despite it’s size, he carried it well, and I could almost feel the bad luck running south away from those eyes.

At Easter, I made the drive down to the Polish parish, to have my food blessed. My basket full of food, vodka and feathers. A woman asked it I came from Krakow. “They like peacock feathers in Krakow.” She said. We talked about reclaiming our traditions, what everyone talks about these days. We are looking for traditions to embrace. She married into her Polish culture, but her accent was beautiful, and her basket was full of good things. I think my husband has done the same. He’s taken root in a house with vodkas on the shelf and pierogi on the table. Now he knows where to tuck the straw at Vilia, and he knows when I should begin to steep the krupnik. With amber and saints all around us, we don’t need peacocks for direction, just for luck, and to remind us again that beauty is eternal.

Good Friday

In my hometown, on Good Friday, churches are open noon to three, and people go to pass the hours when nothing can be done but to pray and mourn. I remember going one year, when the rest of the family was in Ireland, with a couple a barely knew, to St. Stanislaw, to the Polish hours. I wore black, with dark eyes and new black boots and spent more time reflecting on my mournful style than the sacrifice of Christ, but I meant well. I was eighteen. I am only a little better today.

Here, the three hours are spent at home, and on bright days it’s hard to remember that today is a sorrowful day, a day to keep watch beneath the cross.

I am drinking coffee this morning and eating my oatmeal without honey, the sky is beautiful. The Icon Christ looks down on me with sad eyes and out in the woods, a bird cries.

St. Joseph

The feast of St. Joseph on Monday gave us a much needed break from Lenten fasting. I had cream in my coffee and beer late at night. I always feel as though St. Joseph must have been a bit exhausted, being the only imperfect member of the Holy Family, and now, as the patron of nearly everything, he is equally exhausted. We even ask him for help finding the things we’ve lost, as St. Anthony can’t be trusted not to hide them himself. St. Joseph doesn’t have time for games like that, though he sometimes gets distracted. When we want something particular, we tuck a note behind his icon, so the reminder is always there.

On his day, Petka and I gave him a special place at the table, and a candle all his own. Petka tasted a corner of his icon and waved to him while I prayed; the sun shone down through the dome. I put out new candles around the house and realized later that they were all bright red - a good color for luck, for new life, and long, happy days

St. Cassian the Unmerciful

The leap-day is an unlucky day. It is the feast of St. Cassian, whose evil-eye can look out on the world today, withering what he sees. In one story, it is said St. Cassian was given the leap-day as a punishment for failing to help a peasant whose cart had turned over in the mud. Cassian, unmerciful, had passed him by, unwilling to dirty himself by helping the poor man. St. Nikolas, always compassionate, came by later to save the peasant, thereby earning himself two feast days in the Russian calendar, while Cassian was punished with only one every four years.

St. Cassian - unmerciful, is not a Saint to pray to, so much as an entity to fear. His day is dangerous. We went out anyway, but I wrapped Petka in red and gold to keep out his eye, and I wore my red seeds to distract him. When the sun sets, his eyes will lower once again, unable to see and harm for another four years, unless some resentful one asks his intercession, to sour milk or darken the sky.