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The Annunciation

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Marie Howe, in her poem “Once or Twice or Three Times I Saw Something,” envisions Mary as a kind of mystic, a young girl who is already adept at seeing through the veil of this reality and finding the beauty and mystery of God. She’s able to hear the angel and believe his message because she’s already half-intuited that message from the world she walks through. Here’s the poem:

Once or twice or three times, I saw something
rise from the dust in the yard, like the soul
of the dust, or from the field, the soul-body
of the field— rise and hover like a veil in the sun
billowing— as if I could see the wind itself.
I thought I did it— squinting— but I didn’t.
As if the edges of things blurred— so what was in
bled out, breathed up and mingled: bush and cow
and dust and well: breathed a field I walked through
waist high, as through high grass or water, my fingers
swirling through it— or it through me. I saw it.
It was thing and spirit both: the real
world: evident, invisible.*

So Mary is a mystic, who has prepared, through a practice of deep attentiveness, for union with God. But it occurs to me, after meditating upon the annunciation story in Luke, that we’re never given the scene of that union, the story of the conception itself. We’re told about the annunciation, and then the next thing we know, Mary’s already pregnant and on her way to visit her cousin Elizabeth.

There’s a lacuna in the text, a blank space that exists between the annunciation and the visitation, and this painting is a meditation on that lacuna. As I contemplated Mary, I realized that she’s a stand-in for all of us who wait for union with God. What patience she must have had in her waiting. What faith that the promised union would happen. There is a solace in this, a sense that those of us who wait have her companionship in our waiting. As I painted, I wrote my own poem for her:

She Waits with Those Who Wait for God

Leaves are lace on the dawn’s body.
Houses scatter silhouettes at the sky.
All the world waits – for days she’s been waiting.
An angel came in invading
light. An angel called her favored –
she, mystic Mary, who can see –
who languishes in vision, longing
to have no borders, no frontiers to cross –
to be the shadow of a man coming towards her,
and then the man himself,
and then the sunlight in his hair
(she thinks that she might die within his cells –
she thinks that she might flow and stain like sweat) –
to be the green grass and the scalp
of earth beneath it – to ascend
in a yellow pulse along the day –
to balance in the memory
of God – to fall and rise again, like breath.
(Now strong sunlight through the window.
Now a solid brightness to her prayers.
She is an egg of being, a foretaste of delight.
Again, again she absorbs the light
that sunlight shapes against her skin.
Again, again her eyes are laughing sight,
a scatter of air beneath dove’s wings.)

*Howe, Marie (2009-09-08). The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems (Kindle Locations 259-265). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

What does it mean to be wise in today’s world?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The night before, someone had asked me if I thought that life was primarily comedy or primarily tragedy. I said comedy, without really knowing why. Then, as sometimes happens in the most surprising way, I found myself sitting at our Ministerium lunch the very next day, listening as Rabbi Roger Klein supported my sense that life is more comic than sad. Rabbi Klein was talking about wisdom. He had just finished speaking about Richard Sewell’s book, The Vision of Tragedy, in which Sewell asserts that wisdom is a recognition of the tragedies and problems of life, with a corresponding refusal to avoid them, and, most importantly, refusal to submit to them. Now he was speaking about Socrates. Socratic wisdom, he told us, has two main aspects. The first is humility. The second is the sense that life is comedy.

Not, the Rabbi assured us, comedy in a “laugh out loud” mode, but comedy as an ordering principal. He described tragedy and comedy as two species from the same genus. Comedy reflects a fundamentally ordered universe. Tragedy reflects a fundamentally disordered universe. Tragedy reflects the unacceptable contradictions of life, comedy the acceptable contradictions of life. I’ve been taking improv classes for awhile now, and I instinctively understood what he meant. When an improv actor steps out onto the stage, she doesn’t know what prompts she’ll be given or what her scene partners will say or do. She steps out prepared to create a scene from whatever comes her way. She has dedicated herself to the task of finding order in the raw materials of words and emotions and movements, and when we find improv funny, it is not only because of the incidental jokes and ridiculous situations that arise. The true joy that we take in improv arises from the fact that we’re watching order take form out of chaos, and the form that order takes is surprising, sometimes even shocking, but also deeply reassuring, because we human beings can do this. We can, through the simplest actions, reflect a fundamentally ordered universe.

Before talking about Sewell, Rabbi Klein led us through an investigation of David Brooks’s thoughts on wisdom, and Robert Nozick’s. He described Brooks’s point of view as primarily theoretical, given that Brooks is more concerned with thinking through what wisdom is than what it does. There’s a need for the cultivation of factual information and knowledge as we grow to be wise, but also a powerful need for experience. Knowledge gives us the capacity to create and evaluate, but the cultivation of wisdom takes time – it emerges from experience, and, unlike knowledge, it can’t be taught or transferred simply from one person to another. Differing from Brooks, Nozick is more interested in the practical aspects of wisdom. It comes about when we make meaning out of the practical truths that we encounter in the world, and through doing so change our perspective on life. Some of these practical truths are revealed when we attempt to achieve certain goals. We craft means of doing so, become aware of lurking dangers, and eventually come to accept unavoidable limitations. Through this we gain glimmers of self-knowledge. But also through it, if we’re truly wise, we detect, and even participate in, a current of joy. The wise person takes delight in wisdom itself and loves to share it, so that wisdom becomes an overflow of love.

All of these aspects of wisdom are found in scripture. Scripture speaks of the cultivation of the virtues as part of wisdom – do good deeds over and over again until they become your disposition, part of your temperament, inseparable from who you are. Scripture speaks of the transformation of loss, which is part of wisdom. The right response to loss, scripture tells us, is holiness – the redemption of the bad by turning it into something sacred. But most appealingly to me was the idea of comedy. The Bible, Rabbi Klein told us, is comedy, not tragedy. Again and again in both the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the contradictions of life are reconciled and a necessary order is reasserted, even in the face of violence and horror. The Sinai event is a comedic act, an act of creating a new order out of a devastatingly destructive old order. Resurrection is a comedic act, the act of reconciling the contradictions of life and death. In all cases, these acts of God are an overflowing of love, and in the grand comedy, creation itself flows out from God’s wisdom, and we are invited to learn and imitate it.

Considering the Lilies

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Students from the Edge House were singing as we hiked into Conkle’s Hollow. Sandstone cliffs rose up on either side, striated by the lapping waves of an ocean that disappeared millennia ago. Thin trees clung to them, and when the wind blew yellow leaves shook loose and scattered like the rain that was occasionally falling. A thin waterfall trickled down at the trail’s edge, and small fish darted in the shallow pool at its base. And the song reverberated through all of this, as other members of our group arrived at the big rock where the Edge House students were perching, and joined them in singing. We sang pieces from the paperless music tradition that Alice Connor teaches at the Edge House, and then Amazing Grace, at the request of a student from OSU, and then songs by the group Psalters, that Alice lined out for us, giving us each verse in turn and waiting until we’d repeated it before weaving the whole song together. A few years previously, my friend Jared Talbot, who is a post-doc in biology at OSU, had proposed to his wife in the Hocking Hills, and after she’d said yes, they’d hiked to the Rock House, where a Mennonite group had sung song after song together, a gift to any stranger walking through the rock formations. Our singing in Conkle’s Hollow that day allowed Jared to pass that gift on to all the other hikers who had braved the rain and came down the trail behind us.
We were on retreat as a community of campus ministries in the Diocese. There were students from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio State University, Mount Carmel College of Nursing, Xavier, and Ohio University. We had conceived of the retreat as a response to the pressures and anxieties that afflict everyone in Higher Education these days. The anxieties that plague campuses aren’t unreasonable. Students worry about the future, about the amount of debt that they’re taking on, about the availability of jobs in their field when they graduate. They worry about who they are and who they’re becoming, who they’ll love and how they’ll manage to love themselves. When planning the retreat, the campus ministers talked about this anxiety and turned, as we always do, to scripture to help us make sense of the present mood and frame a response to it. We looked at Jesus’s words in Matthew 6 – “can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? Why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” We talked about how Jesus’s words might have multiple meanings. Yes, they’re a call to rest faithfully in God’s grace, but they’re also direct advice. Go and look at some flowers. It will make you feel better. And, we added, extending the thought, consider who you really are responsible for. There are so many voices demanding our attention that we can’t possibly respond gracefully to all of them. If we can become clear about our true responsibility, we can choose not to answer the demands of those whom we really aren’t responsible for, and give ourselves more fully to the things that truly call us.
So we gathered at a rented house in the Hocking Hills on a weekend in late October. When we gathered on Saturday morning, we introduced ourselves by naming things we were grateful for. Then Alice led us in a meditation on Ruth, who is responsible both to Naomi, her bereaved mother-in-law, but also to herself, going to Boaz in the night and requiring that he pledge his protection to her before she lays with him on the threshing floor. Out of the grace of this meditation, we went to Conkle’s Hollow, where we sang together at the base of the sandstone cliffs. Granted, it was October, and the only lilies in evidence were in a vase back at the house. But when the singing ended we all felt the profound stillness of the light rain of an October day. Later that afternoon, some of us hiked again, to the Rock House, and sat in the ancient hollowed out cliffs that had once served as a tribal fort, watching the play of color on rock and drift of leaves as they fell. That evening we gathered for public story-telling, asking first who had taught us responsibility in our lives, and then telling stories about the time when we came into our own sense of deep responsibility. These stories proved to be intense and powerful and often very sad. A box of tissues was passed along from person to person. And it occurred to me, listening to them, that there is often something lost in the moment when we come into our responsibility. They are so often moments of crisis, when the old dispensation, under which we’re free from the responsibility that someone else bears for us, disappears, and we find the weight of that responsibility shift onto our shoulders. And yet every one of these stories was a story of gain, as well, since receiving and accepting responsibility is an act of love. By accepting responsibility, we grow in our ability to love.
George, one of the Downtowners Campus Ministry group, pushed us to think beyond the responsibility we bear towards ourselves and those we love, and consider the responsibility we have for the world at large. The next morning, Dr. Ellen O’Shaunessy brought the point home in her homily as she talked about a trip that she and her husband had taken to Mother Emmanuel in Charleston after the murders this summer. How do we move beyond the confines of our own narrow world, and realize that we are responsible for strangers, some of whom act and look in ways that are very different from us? And how, and most challenging, do we learn to feel responsibility for those who have done us grievous harm – the killers who pick up guns and take innocent lives? After she was done speaking, we found an answer to her question in shared eucharist, and shared singing, which teaches us that greater responsibility that encompasses the whole world. It’s a lesson we learn bit by bit – by learning responsibility to ourselves, how to rest and how to discern our heart’s true call, and by learning responsibility to our loved ones, by taking on their burdens in moments of crisis. We learn through listening carefully to each other, as singers do when matching their voices, and by looking carefully at the world, at the shape of cliffs and the fall of leaves. When we consider the lilies, its not a small or insignificant act. It’s a moment of preparation for the coming Kingdom of God, a way of glimpsing that Kingdom, resting in it, and confirming that we’re willing to do whatever is required to help bring that Kingdom about and have it reverberate through other people, as if it were a song.

Conkle's Hollow

How do we form pilgrim communities?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

When Greg Hitzhusen was a student at Yale Divinity School, he and a few others started an Outing Club, which took students out onto the campus for weekly meditations, and also took a spring break hiking trip every year. One day, while they were hiking in North Carolina, they came out onto Shining Rock at sunset and saw forested land spreading before them for miles. They had what Greg describes as a collective spiritual experience. This experience was the fruit of the group’s deep investment in their exploration of nature spirituality, and their acceptance of the hard work of being in the wild.

It was a high point of Greg’s many years spent exploring nature spirituality, during which he found many profound teachers. A few years before, he’s taken part in the Yitziah Jewish Outdoor Leadership Training Course, and become fascinated by the spiritual communities that can spring up in the midst of wilderness programs. He concentrated his academic research on similar outdoor environmental ministries, delving into how they thought about their work, both practically and theologically. He found that they all emphasized spiritual growth and renewal, often tying participants’ experiences to the wilderness stories of the Jewish and Christian traditions. His research made him conversant with a number of writers on creation spirituality, such as Stephen Kellert, Ursula Goodenough, and Bron Taylor.

We’d invited him to the Ministerium because we wanted to explore the idea of pilgrim communities, groups of people who come together for a set religious purpose, for a limited amount of time, and then disperse when that purpose is accomplished. Could these outdoor ministries serve as an example of such pilgrim communities, we wondered, and if so, what could we learn from them? Part of our concern was over their accessibility. Is there a way participate in pilgrim communities that are based around nature spirituality, even if one isn’t physically able to go on long hiking trips. or prevented from doing so by family or work responsibilities? Yes, Greg told us, all you need is a group that is intentional about going outside. He told us about the square foot exercise, in which one spends an hour simply meditating on a square foot of ground. Even such a simple thing can lead one to state of wonder and awe, since every small patch of ground is so amazingly various.

But the best practices for forming a pilgrim community in nature do require immersion in the natural world, which is best accomplished through multi-day excursions. Greg said that groups of twelve to fifteen people are best, since they allow for intimacy and variety without becoming unmanageable. A lot of very intentional planning needs to go into a successful trip. It’s a good idea to ground the trip in worship, maybe starting and ending with liturgies within a home trip. This, indeed, is one place where he nuanced our idea of pilgrim communities, since many of the groups that head out on these trips do so from a synagogue or church, a base community which supports them and which they benefit through their pilgrimage.

Once the group has started out on the trail, it’s important to engage them in what Greg calls a “portal” exercise. These are exercises that are meant to mark the liminality of beginnings, where pre-existing concerns and worries are named and then left behind. Through these exercises, a group begins to know itself as a group. Part of a group’s formation is its coming to understand the importance of mutual leadership. Sometimes groups of people assume that, regardless of any rhetoric around learning to trust one’s own leadership, there will, at the end of the day, always be someone there to bail them out. Experienced trail guides know that the only way to counter this assumption is to let group leaders fail, even if it means that they take people for miles in the wrong direction. Through such an experience, they come to understand that their leadership really belongs to them, and isn’t merely a hollow rhetorical device.

During these journeys, participants learn to value something other than peak-chasing. Sometimes the most profound moment doesn’t come on a mountain top, but while wading through weeds and bracken. And on all of these journeys, participants learn what their Jewish and Christian spiritual forerunners always knew – that the wilderness has the capacity of clearing away the distractions of our lives, and helping us notice the presence of God all around us.

Towards the end of his talk, Greg paraphrased Thomas Aquinas, who said that no one thing can adequately reflect the goodness of God, which is why God made all things. Often our faith communities become inward focused, and fall into thinking that they, somehow, know all there is to say about God. But creation is saying something more. Can we, as pilgrim communities, open the book of nature and learn from it?

My Summer in the Body

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

That first night in Traverse City, having driven all day to get there, I rode seven miles on my bike, through woods that bordered a broad inlet, to a yoga studio in an old office park. The studio itself was on the second floor of an a-frame building, and we laid out our mats under roof beams and skylights designed by a ‘70s architect who wanted to make its occupants feel as if they were perpetually settling into a deep woods cabin for a long winter’s night. Now it was July, and the sun came through the skylights strongly. Some of the panes were stained glass, and patterns of wavy red and green fell across our bodies. The instructor told us that she had been to a workshop over the weekend, where she had been challenged to cultivate her gratitude, and given the practice of giving thanks for each person that she met during the course of a day. She led us in centering our breath, and told us that it’s from the breath that we draw our strength and balance. After the class I rode back to the hotel through the darkening woods. In 2001, the city erected a large-scale model of the solar system along the trail, with miles between the far flung planets. I rode passed them, towards the sun at their center. I had never felt more at home in my own body, stronger or more connected to the world outside my skin. The bike seemed to float with no real effort from my legs, which rotated on the pedals as if they were rotating planets themselves.

This was halfway through a summer during which I dedicated myself to exploring body spiritually, a summer in which I visited a Reiki practitioner, did a lot of yoga, walked the labyrinth, and meandered meditatively with the dog. The fact that Christianity is so disconnected from the body had really begun to trouble me. We believe, after all, in an incarnate God. We believe that mystery took human form and occupied a body that was just like ours. Not an idealized body, not a perfect body, but an aching, sneezing, itching body. In John 6, Jesus goes out of his way to annoy everyone by using the word sarx to describe this body. There were two words for body in Greek, sarx and soma. Soma is the good or neutral body, the healthy body of a stranger coming down the street, or the idealized body of a loved one whom we hold in our arms. Sarx, however, is the body that ails, that has unpleasant functions, that bears wounds and scars. It is the body on the toilet. And this was the body that Jesus claimed for himself, and told his followers to partake in. Yet for most of Christian history we’ve run away from the body, and haven’t developed forms of body spirituality as the Hindus developed yoga, the Sufis developed ecstatic dancing, and the Buddhists wrote entire sutras about the breath. Christians find ourselves borrowing these practices because we have so few practices of our own. If Jesus loved and partook in the body, even and most especially the sarx body, shouldn’t we? And can attentiveness to the body aid in the work of the soul?

I began my summer-long exploration of these questions with Reiki. I met a Reiki practitioner while visiting a friend in the hospital, and a few weeks later I went to visit her and her house so that she could explain Reiki to me. We sat in her parlor as lithe cats prowled the carpet and draped themselves across the furniture, and she told me that she had first learned of Reiki from a nun, who had been her first teacher and mentor. The Catholic Church has since prohibited the practice of Reiki, she told me, since it doesn’t come from the Christian tradition, although the church does still approve of the idea of healing touch. I found this attitude difficult to understand, since Christianity has long practiced a tolerant appropriation of practices from other faiths, borrowing all sorts of things, including our Christmas traditions and the fact that we call the Day of the Resurrection “Easter.” But as my friend talked, I began to feel some of the reserve that must have effected the Catholic bishops. She talked of auras and seeing ectoplasm running down walls, and of a cultivated sixth sense that helped her in her work. There seemed to be a whole worldview behind Reiki that I wasn’t sure I could subscribe to. But I remained curious, and made an appointment so that I could experience Reiki for myself.

A few days later I lay on a message table in her Reiki room, after having signed a form in which I gave her permission to touch me and agreed to keep my clothes on. Since I’m naturally reticent about my body, I had more trouble consenting to the former than the latter. She dimmed the lights and put on a playlist of meditative chanting, which on New Age albums is almost always accompanied by synth music. I closed my eyes. For a long time, there was only stillness. I’d peek from time to time and see her moving her hands in the air above my body, sometimes making soothing motions, sometimes brushing at something, cleansing my aura. Eventually her hands came to rest on my shoulder and my arm. I had wanted to set aside all thought during the session, to practice centering prayer as it was going on. Usually, during centering prayer, little skeins of thought flit past my mind, like the strips of paper inside of fortune cookies. During the Reiki session, my mind filled with incredibly vibrant images. I followed them, one after another, as they shifted and transformed. It surprised me, because even though I paint and draw, I seldom think in images. It felt as if some dormant part of my creativity was being set free. Maybe this shouldn’t have surprised me, since my entire premise had been that the soul and the body are intimately connected. It made a kind of sense that a body practice would untangle knots of memory and realign thought itself.

Reiki, for me, was deeply cataphatic, meaning that it was full of positive, descriptive images of the self and the divine. It was about perception, in the same way that a walk with the dog is about perception. For me, these walks are an opportunity to train my ability to see. I walk slowly and study the neighborhood carefully, watching the buds leaf and the flowers bloom, and, as the summer continues, the sidewalk grow littered with debris from the trees. For me, cataphatic spirituality implies a deep attentiveness – attentiveness to images and nature, and also attentiveness to thought. Meditation, in the classic Christian sense of the word, is about attentiveness. We meditate with scripture (lectio divina), images (visio divina), or experience (Ignatian examinem), and happily follow the lines of revelatory thought that these practices lead us to. The body can be brought into this kind of spirituality fairly easily, as my experience with Reiki demonstrated. In Christian practice, walking labyrinths lends itself to cataphatic spirituality, as the labyrinth is an invitation to go deeply into one’s sense of self and journey with God. But in the center of the labyrinth, you’re supposed to stop, and simply rest in God. Only, what should you do with the body while you’re resting in God?

This resting in God is apophatic spirituality, a spirituality that is content not to know, that accepts that truth is often beyond words, and that advocates divine relationship over theological or personal meanings. Apophatic spirituality is more about intention than it is about attention. It is the spirituality of contemplation, where we gently refuse to become entangled in our thoughts, and wait patiently for in-breaking moments of a grace and a deep sense of relationship with God. It is the spirituality that Denise Levertov expresses in her poem The Avowal:

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

Can the body be involved in this kind of spirituality as well?

I turned to yoga to try to answer this question. I went to many different yoga classes, in many different studios over the course of the summer. A friend of mine complains that yoga studios have become boutiques, always willing to sell you stretchy pants and fancy dew-rags in their elaborate lobbies. Large images of Hindu gods and goddesses, or of the Buddha, often predominate. It’s unclear to me whether my fellow yoga practitioners are followers of the Buddha, or even know which Hindu god they’re facing, but I have to admit that I don’t feel uncomfortable in these environments, for all their New Age incoherence and costly paraphernalia. The instructors are always very intentional in telling us to reverence whoever we want to, and when we dedicate our practice, I dedicate mine to the Jesus I carry in my heart.

I have never been particularly athletic, nor agile, nor coordinated. So yoga presented a challenge for me from the beginning. Just moving between and holding the poses occupied my entire consciousness. This led to a de facto kind of centering, as my pesky, meandering thoughts slid away and my body stretched and stretched. What surprised me was that yoga led me to a deeper understanding of centering prayer itself. Often when I’m praying, I come to moments where my thoughts are temporarily in abeyance. These moments don’t last very long. Soon a new thought floats across my mind and I forget to let it pass me by, and follow it. Then I have to use my centering word and bring myself back, for another brief moment, to that place of contemplation. I have begun to think of such moments as moments of balance. Just as, while practicing yoga, I find balance in a pose for a moment or two, until my muscles start to quaver and my body starts to tilt, so in Centering Prayer I find moments of balance before the muscles of my consciousness invariably contract. The soul and the body seem to have the same frame, to experience the same vagaries, to achieve the same balances.

John O’Donohue said that the old neo-platonic way of understanding the body and the soul is backwards. For the neo-platonists, the body was the prison of the soul, and the soul languished within the walls of our bones and skin. For O’Donohue, it is the soul that contains the body, encircles it, holds the body within its embrace. When we meet people, we meet their souls first. I have a dancer friend who talks about kinesphere, that orbit of personal space that surrounds our bodies. Some people have expansive kinespheres and some have contracted ones, and we can sense it, and understand how open they are to the world by our apprehension of their kinesphere. The other day at the grocery store I saw two women together, both with their faces pointed resolutely at the floor, their shoulders rounded forward, their arms held tightly to their sides. I felt that I was looking at their constricted souls, and felt compassion for them, but also, remembering the advice of the yoga instructor in Traverse City, gave thanks to God for them. It is, perhaps, true that we can understand the state of the soul by looking at the body and the way it moves through the environment, even if we don’t indulge in ideas of auras or ectoplasm.

My summer in the body has taught me that to pay attention to the body is to pay attention to the soul, and vice versa. They belong with each other, intimately connected, and the prayer of one is, in the end, the prayer of the other. I’ll go even further than that. To pray with both body and soul is to intentionally link oneself to the cosmos. The body helps us to notice and apprehend the universe that surrounds us. The soul helps us to make meaning of it, and enter into relationship with it. We are, all of us, navigating solar systems of thought, movement, and relationship, both on earth and within our glimpses of heaven.