epiphany

The magi came from the East led by a star to see a child a king whose birth was foretold. The king the Romans gave the Jews plotted to kill the child with the help of the wise dreamers the magicians.  The found him and gave him gifts of prophetic kingship. Then they left without giving Herod the help he sought. He killed many children in an unsuccessful attempt to get the one who threatened his kingship.

We look about us at the political lies and violence and think it means much more than it possibly can. The Herods, the Hitlers, the shadow behind every throne all pass away before the light promised by this ordinary baby, his teen-aged unwed mother, and his probably perplexed but trusting father who was not his father according to the angel who warned him against Herod. He trusted the angel and took the child and his mother to safety

Epiphany. The sight of God in the small and unexpected.  Turn off the TV and the internet and forget the big for a moment. Go out and help a child learn to read even though the big tells you their will be no money to feed him and no work for him to do. Stop drinking just for today even though you are sure you can't. Your inability, your lack of power is the opening through which the power of God can enter the world you have made for yourself and lead you into a world that is unimaginably beautiful because it is real.

I walk down the apartment hallway on the way to the bathroom and fall to my knees because that baby that moment is now. I pray from my freedom because God is here to listen. What Herod built for himself is gone and no one cares anymore because however much blood he spilt he could not make it real. This is real. This step, this spot on the ground, this person in front of you right now even though you have nothing for him and he has nothing for you. He is here because he is here for your help. Trust that you will know which way the help must go after you find out.

prophecy

God speaks to us through prophets. I don't believe this most of the time because if I believe what a prophet says to me and that it is from God, then I would have to listen and amend my life accordingly. It is easier to just leave God out of the picture all together and live a life that is based on earning and spending, minding my own business, and relying on social structures and common sense. If God even exists he has more important things to do than to be worried about me and my life.

Now and then things break apart and then God's speaking to me through prophecy (in the Bible, the signs of the times, or in church) is what I earnestly want. When we lost our first kid in childbirth because she got tangled up in her umbilical cord and died,  I really wanted God to tell me it was a terrible mistake and that she wasn't really dead. He was silent. A woman from next door who had gone through the same thing many years previously and had to carry a baby she knew was dead to full term told my wife she had made it through and life in the face of such a great loss was possible. My wife wrapped her pain around her like a dark blanket and stayed in the suffering of loss for a long time afterward. I gave up on her and on God and went about my life in a semi-Buddhist existential funk getting more and more isolated from her, other people and reality. We buried the body and would visit the grave in Bucks county now and then and I would howl. I worried about her being cold in the ground.

I had a stroke 10 years later. It changed me and when people asked me why I'd had a stroke, I said it was the wrath of God, more as a joke than anything else. My personality changed and I found the anger of the frightened and after a year, my wife left and I was alone. I rejoined a fellowship that helped me stop drinking by giving me connection with other people, many of whom did believe in God. The tension between wanting to be alone and hating loneliness worked on me until I met another woman who is a born again Christian. She began to work on me with the Bible. One cold spring day I was home from work with bad lower back pain.

It was one of those where it hurts to sit, to stand, or to lay down. Moving, sneezing, farting all hurt. I was reading the book of Romans which had previously meant as much to me as reading the stains on the carpet or the frost on a window. It said something about Abraham trusting that God would to what he promised. I wanted to kneel on the floor and pray but a voice inside me said, "Do nothing." The pain vanished like a candle being blown out. Poof.

I concluded it was God and took it as a sign of his power.

So I am open to the idea that he can speak to us through the Bible when he is ready and circumstances have made us ready to listen.I hear the arguments already but against them all I know the pain disappeared.

end of it all

It is nearly 6 am and I just prayed. I talked out loud to God while I sat on my couch in my little white cabin in Misty Meadows. I told him I am not sure whether he hears me when I pray. I usually think my prayers, which means, usually, that I space out and wind up just thinking about what ever memories or fears happen to drift through my mind. Resentment and fear. Worry.  Waste of time in the sense that nothing useful, beautiful, or true ever comes from it. It seems then I am just talking to myself. Talking out loud felt strange but seemed right. I told him I was worried about my work situation and that I would trust him to find me the right job at the right time. I asked him to take care of my friend, Connie, and her husband who is also a good friend of mine. I asked him to watch over my mother and the rest of my family. I asked him to show me how to be a better friend and to help me to do a good job with the kids I will be working with today in North Philly. I said, “Thank you.”

I picked up a book by Father Richard Rohr about contemplation and read it for minute. Then God spoke to me. My body filled with heat and my eyes filled with tears and I know he hears me now and forever. I has happened this way for years and I am not sure why. I might be partly crazy but I don’t think so. It seems comparable to getting wet in the rain or sweating in the summer heat. He is present to me and I am present to him and there are no words. Then the thoughts came and it was time to write.

When I was trying to become a Trappist monk, the vocation monk told me I was a contemplative. He said that meant I had to be willing to be invisible and to pray in the background for the activities of men and for God’s wisdom and grace to be with them. It didn’t sound glamorous at all. I kind of want to be famous and recognized by big crowds of people. This business of being invisible has no appeal. Merton was a Trappist and he was famous. I can write books from the silence and then big crowds of people will look me up and come to roll around in my wisdom and spiritualness. Maybe I can meet Joan Baez.

Well, I can’t be a Trappist because I am too old, I have two daughters I love who need me to work to support them, and I have a protestant girlfriend who gets pissed off whenever I try to play the monk. I have a mind that rarely stops moving but when it does I find myself overflowing with unbearably joyful sorrow. Sometimes it is comforting; most times it just hurts. This makes me a contemplative and I pray in the background more invisible than the most invisible Trappist. I work with the poor kids in Philly to pay my bills and child support. I pray for the real monks and go to my meetings with the crumbling alcoholic souls I find myself around. We learn to heal one another in our wounds. God is here, now, in this, exactly. God is in the world because he made us in his image and likeness and he put us into the world. I trust that he will find a place for me somewhere and that he will teach me to make a place for him within me. Father James, Father Andrew, and all my monk brothers pray for me.

Somehow some day we will make a book out of this though books are going the way of druidic bards, cuneiform, and hieroglyphics. I write with no particular hope anyone will read or care much about what I have to say. I think God wants me to write because I can and want to most days so I pray if you read this, it finds you well and helps you in some way. john

the monastery

sunrise prayers to keep the planet turning
the tree to the east horizon taller as the years go
the wind in the tulip poplars high behind high west
i suppose
silence heard at five years of entering
vows to this monastery of failed contemplatives
this island of misfit toys
it sounds the same as the incensed din
at the better one