Sabbatical Journal 5

I am not much familiar with chanting, as in Gregorian Chant. I do recall when recordings of monks chanting became popular for a bit some years back, and so I have heard it, but it isn’t something I typically listen to. I’ve was immersed in it for nearly two days at the monastery, however, and I have a new appreciation for it.

That is not to say it is likely to replace the Indie music that populates my playlist. My appreciation is for its use as a foundation for worship and prayer. If you’re not familiar, this sort of music uses a somewhat different sort of musical notation and it utilizes no harmonies. Those of us who were guest at the monastery were invited to participate in the chanting, but were also reminded that the purpose was to sing in one voice. No voice should be heard over any other, and the monks had much training in this. (In other words, sing quietly so we didn’t mess it up.)

There were some hymns that were sung along with with a Kyrie, Sanctus, and so on. But by far most of the singing chanted psalms and a few other scripture passages. For the psalms, the singing went back and forth from side to side. The left side sang two lines then the right side until the piece was complete. It was in the moments when I was on the non-singing side that I got the fullest sense of the “one voice” concept. Listening and not singing myself, I could hear the absolutely beautiful, pure sound of a single voice made up of many monks and a few of the guests. It was stunning to behold.

I think it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who once wrote that all congregational singing should be in unison. He was not speaking of the chanting but of good old hymns like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Still, my recollection is that he was arguing for something similar to what the monks were seeking, a single voice lifted in worship to God.

I don’t recall the nuances of his argument so I won’t guess at them here. And I don’t know that I would never want to hear harmonies when we sing at church. But I do think that the singing of harmonies easily moves from worship to performance, and performance tends to be more about us, which only reinforces backwards notions of worship already so prevalent. (Think of the popular notion that worship is supposed to “feed” the worshiper.)

I suspect that the monks have much to teach us about worship. But we live in such different worlds and cultures, I wonder if they can be translated to where we can understand.

Sabbatical Journal 4

The monastery had a sleep late Saturday with morning vigil starting at 5:00 a.m. rather than 4:00. After a full 24 hours of the rhythms of life here, I can see the appeal, though I don’t think I would want to do it permanently. It would be nice to come for a week of so, to spend an extended time cut off from internet and news, living largely in silence, life completely ordered around chanted prayers, psalms, and worship, with work in the morning and time for meditation or reflection in the afternoon.

This afternoon I decided to go for a walk. I thought I might go back up the road to where I had seen the bighorn sheep the day before. My path from the guesthouse took me by the parking lot where I discovered my motorcycle had a nearly flat tire. My walk interrupted, it took me more than an hour to find the leak and repair it. But besides the aggravation and a lost hour and a half, I was able to continue my walk and slip back into he rhythms of the monastery.

But that aggravating interruption was a reminder that I had only borrowed the monastery’s rhythms for a bit. I must leave for Ghost Ranch in the morning, something that cannot be done without a functioning tire. Unlike the permanent residents here, I, like most other people, am captive to other rhythms. Even on a a sabbatical, a time of extended rest, I have places to go and appointments to keep. And when the sabbatical is ended, it will be even more so. My vocation as pastor may mitigate the rhythms of the modern world a bit (I’m not altogether certain that is true.), but I am not so different from many others, caught up in rhythms we did not really choose for ourselves.

That is not to say that we don’t have a hand in shaping these rhythms that we’ve appropriately named the “rat race.” But the rhythms that enslave many of us are hard to avoid. Our jobs, our schooling, children’s extracurricular activities, and more demand much of us. Our appetites and desires are shaped by sophisticated advertising, entertainment, and popular culture. It takes a great deal of willpower not to get deeply enmeshed in rhythms that are not healthy for us physically or spiritually.

Hence the appeal of a place like this, a community that lives by an entirely different set of rhythms, life giving ones rather than the life draining ones many of us know. But most of us cannot become Benedictine monks, and I suspect that few of us would choose to if we could. But perhaps we can learn from their different set of rhythms.

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I wonder if my experience with the bighorn might be helpful for me on this. Actually I’m thinking of that and one other encounter. Reflecting on the bighorn reminded me of another animal surprise that happened the day before. I was sitting in my campground with darkness fast approaching when a hummingbird flew right up to me, stopping about 18 inches from my chest and hovering there. (The hummingbirds I’ve noticed out west are slightly larger than those I’m familiar with and have no coloring I’ve observed other than black and white.)

I don’t think a hummingbird would mistake me for a flower, so I have no idea what it was doing there, fluttering just inches away. I had done nothing intentional to attract this visitor who had simply shown up, unannounced. I had not even been looking at or for birds. I had just been sitting there, enjoying the heat of the day give way to the chill of the high desert.

With neither hummingbird nor bighorn had I in any way summoned the creature’s presence. Both had presented themselves to me, completely unexpected. But in both cases, I had put myself in the position for their visitation. I had become still and simply been available in the one case. In the other, I had ventured into the wilderness for retreat. Neither action guaranteed anything remarkable, but my I would not have met my visitors otherwise.

The rhythms of the world most of us live in offer scant opportunities for sudden appearances of bighorns or hummingbirds. Or God? I mentioned previously that God had seemed for me even more elusive of late. And while different rhythms are no guarantee that God will suddenly cross my path or hover just in front of me, I wonder to what degree the rhythms of my daily living make such encounters extremely unlikely.

Sabbatical Journal 3

I drove to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert today. It was a fairly short trip from the Albuquerque area and a lovely relaxing drive, except for the last thirteen miles. That’s the length of the winding, sometimes gravel, sometimes clay, often rutted “road” that provides the only access to the highway. It is something of an adventure simply reaching the place, and no small amount of work on a motorcycle.

The riding was striking in its beauty, however, and at times the aroma of the sagebrush was almost overwhelming. The area is rugged, high desert with a strip of lushness surrounding the Chama River flowing just left of the road. As I neared the monastery, stark cliffs jutted up to my left, and multicolored mountains were in the distance. It is just the sort of landscape that drew Georgia O’Keefe to the area.

As beautiful as it was, it was also very hot, and the relatively low speed allowed by the road meant that my motorcycle’s air conditioning (the wind) was not functioning terribly well. I was very excited see mile marker 12 appear, meaning I was almost there. But then a bighorn sheep crossed my path.

I’ve never seen one in the wild before. I’ve been places they inhabit, but they’ve not showed themselves. As I reached the place he had crossed the road, I saw that she was standing not too far away. (I’m unsure of whether it was a ewe or an immature male.) So I found a place where I could stop and park the bike. By the time I got off and removed my helmet, she had moved but then re-emerged onto the road just ahead and stopped.

I got out my camera phone and slowly moved toward her. She looked at me intently be didn’t move. I had always thought of these as furtive, reclusive creatures, but there she was, just watching me as I approached.

When I got close enough for a good picture, I decided to take a shot lest she decided she’d had enough of me. Just as I was taking the pictures, I noticed the car coming toward me from the direction of the monastery. She noticed, too, and proceeded to dart off with a rather flashy display of white rump rear hooves thrown into the air.

The moment gone, I got back on my bike, crested the hill and arrived at the monastery’s guest house where I unloaded my gear. After resting up a bit and reading some of the information and reflections in “A Guest Compendium” that I found in the room, I ventured out for a quick look around. I walked just a short distance back up that road, taking a few pictures of the grandeur all around, from the staggering vistas to the blooming cacti. And I wondered about my short stay here. Would I find any of the peace or spiritual renewal some of the writers in the compendium spoke so eloquently of experiencing on their visits.

I’ve been feeling more than a little burned out of late, and that has had a significant impact on my spiritual life. God has seemed more and more elusive of late. As I walked back toward the guest house, I found myself thinking of that bighorn as a metaphor for God’s elusiveness. On previous trips out west, I’ve wanted very badly to see one, but never had. And now, when it was the furthest thing from my mind, one walked out and stood in the road in front of me.

I’m not entirely sure what to do with this metaphor. It only struck me a few moments ago. But perhaps it will be a helpful one as I enter into the Benedictine rhythms for the next two days.

Sabbatical Journal 2

Before I left on my road trip/sabbatical, a wonderful member of the church I serve said to me that he hoped I found whatever I was looking for. I confess that I was caught just a little off guard by his words because I had not really thought of my trip in those terms. Perhaps I should.

When the idea of this trip first struck me, it wasn’t in the form of a search or quest. It was simply an intriguing possibility. It likely emerged from recollections of an unfinished motorcycle trip nearly forty year previous, a trip that visited much of the country but didn’t make California or the Southwest thanks to an unfortunate encounter with a logging truck in Oregon. And that previous trip didn’t really have any grand purpose. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.

Of course such a trip has some obvious pluses. It is something I know that I enjoy doing. It would provide a big disconnect from my usual life. It would also provide amply opportunity for thinking, pondering, reflecting, and such, not unlike an extended retreat. And then there is the fact that almost every encounter with people on the trip will be with strangers. What surprising encounter of Christ in the other might await?

Still, despite many good points to be made for a trip such as this, there was no real object of the trip. Other than the plan to hit a lot of national parks and include a couple of stops at some communities of intentional, spiritual practice, the trip wasn’t framed in such a way that I could know if I had found what I was looking for. 

I’m not sure if that is a good of a bad thing. One could make a case for the sort of aimless wandering that only realizes its destination after having arrived there. Less a search and more a serendipity I suppose.

At the same time, the lack of any clear goals could be a laziness on my part, or perhaps a fear of failure should I not reach some stated goal, clearly not to have found what I was looking for. And as there was always an assumed spiritual element to the trip, a vague hope of drawing closer to God, failure on that count could be more than a little disturbing.

So what am I looking for? I don’t know that I am much clearer than when that church member raised the issue for me, although I have made a few observations. I’ve barely begun, but things have clearly leaned too heavily toward the doing side without sufficient being. I wanted to get there and then experience things. It’s given the trip a busy feel so far, and I definitely need to find a better balance. Perhaps a lack of clear spiritual goals makes it easy to default to busyness.

I have a two day stay at a monastery followed by a week long art workshop and stay at Ghost Ranch, a Presbyterian conference center northwest of Santa Fe. (I’m not very artistic so this should be interesting.) Perhaps this will help with the balance I mentioned earlier and even give me some clearer spiritual focus.

After that time, will I know what I’m looking for? Dare I say that I need to find God or faith or spirituality in some way? If I did, what would that say about my current state? But I’m glad the church member said what he did.

Sabbatical Journal 1

Internet access has been spotty so I’ll be uploading these as the opportunity presents itself.

My first two Sundays on my motorcycle road trip/sabbatical presented remarkable contrasts. The second was spent in Big Bend National Park, the first place on my list of sabbatical destinations. The previous Sunday had been part of the preliminary phase a stop along the way as I headed toward the American Southwest and California, the parts of the country I’ve never seen on a motorcycle.

Falls Church, VA to Big Bend, TX is a long drive, so I stopped and visited relatives in the Carolinas as I began, and then headed for Austin and short stay with my daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. From there, the road trip/sabbatical would begin in earnest.

Even when I was younger, I could never have made the drive to Austin straight through, and now that I’m old, I decided on a three day drive rather than two. (My days of 600 mile days in the saddle are long behind me.) As I prepared to depart the Carolinas, I picked a couple of stops that broke the journey into rough thirds. The first happened to be Montgomery, AL. 

When I texted my wife that I was stopping in Montgomery, she sent back an article about the National Memorial for Peace and Justice there, noting that it was supposed to be really good. I’d seen news coverage when it first opened, at least on the Lynching Memorial part. The Memorial has a nearby adjacent museum as well, but with a 400 mile drive that day, I decided to take in just the Lynching Memorial.

Growing up in the South, I never heard much about lynchings. I supposed them to be vigilante sort of things that were aberrations from the norm, the kind of thing that I sometimes saw in an old Western movie. But lynchings of African Americans in the South (and in more than a few spots outside it) were not aberrant, vigilante actions. They were part of the Jim Crow culture instituted after the Civil war, a culture determined to keep blacks subservient. 

Along with segregation, poll taxes, and other officially sanctioned tactics, lynchings were an important, unofficially sanctioned tactic. Often these were not clandestine, in-the-dark-of-night events. Some lynchings were attended by thousands of spectators. Local police would provide crowd control, and white parents would pose their children for photos next to the lifeless body. (Lynching victims were often beaten and burned along with being hung.)

The memorial has separate, suspended metal blocks, each representing a county with the victims’ names (if known) and dates of the lynchings. The numbers were appalling, and they played out as one might expect, with counties in the Deep South and other areas where the economy had been largely slave dependent having the larger numbers of lynchings. (St. Claire County in Illinois was a top offender however, with 40 lynchings.)

Far from vigilante aberrations, lynchings were a terror campaign designed to keep blacks fearful and, therefore, in their place. Mass migrations of African Americans to the North was about much more than better opportunity there. These were literally refugees fleeing terrorism. It’s no wonder that southern leaders kept lynchings out of the history books and schools I attended in North and South Carolina.

The memorial had many plaques along the walls that told the tale of one particular lynching. This one caught my eye. “Elizabeth Lawrence was lynched in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1933 for reprimanding white children who threw rocks at her.” When I think about this sort of horror happening with the large scale acceptance and support of the white population, it makes me terrible pessimistic about the state of the human condition. Many times I’ve heard people ask how it was that so many Germans stood by as Hitler imprisoned and then killed millions of Jews with good answers hard to come by. The scale and the official government sanction of the Holocaust are very different, but the public acceptance, nonchalance, a participation in lynchings strike me as very much the same thing.

I suppose that this is why there are Holocaust deniers and why the South has never really owned up to its treatment of people of color. To do so is to admit to something appalling about ourselves and the society we constructed. It is much more appealing to construct fictions about the Civil War as a noble fight for states rights and to forget things such as lynchings for which no heroic or palatable narrative can be constructed.

And that brings me back around to the remarkable contrast between my first and second Sundays on the road. On the first Sunday I witnessed the appalling, horrifying depths to which humans can sink. Not just a few, deranged humans, but the vast majority, perhaps all of them. But on the second Sunday, I witnessed the untold grandeur of Creation, something the pictures I took at Big Bend don’t come close to capturing. And I wonder if I’m not experiencing the very contrast provided by the first two Creation stories in the biblical book of Genesis.

The first story, known to many merely by its seven-day formula, depicts God at work creating the world. Humans are not actors in this story. They are to have a special role of caring for this creation, but in the story itself, they never speak. They are one among many wonders God makes, all of them deemed “good” by their Creator.

But the Hebrews who pulled together what we call the Old Testament using various writings, stories, and myths available to them, knew that this opening story could not be the only one. It required a darker partner, because they, too, knew of this terrible contrast between God’s grand Creation and humanity’s capacity for appalling behavior and unwillingness to own up to such behavior.

In terms of composition, the so-called Adam and Eve story is much older than the seven-day story, but am I glad those ancient Hebrews chose the order they did. At least we get to start with grandeur. But the dark turn will not wait. Because modern people so seldom understand the use and purpose of myth, we miss the terrible pathos of the second story and the hard questions that it raises. Has human behavior irrevocably damaged Creation? And what of humanity’s relationship to its Creator as well as to one another? Contrary to popular thought, the ancient writings in the first eleven chapters of Genesis are not unsophisticated, scientifically bad attempts to explain “what happened.” Rather they are very sophisticated religious thought that makes use of story and myth to grapple with the terrible questions that arise when facing the sort of terrible contrast I experienced on two, successive Sundays. 

The answers that Israel’s theologians give tend not to fit neatly into the sort of religious formulas that many modern Christians seem to like. But through the course of these stories there continues to arise a hope that God will not abandon humanity to its terrible capacities. Hope keeps rearing its head, a theme that continues in the New Testament. 

A regular feature of this hope is that it demands we are honest about our own complicity in creating the appalling stories that continue to be written. Hope does not come by explaining them away, excusing them, or denying them. It requires something often deemed unpopular and old fashioned, confession and repentance. Oh, how we resist that, as my own Southern story so well attests. But God keeps intruding and offering chance for hope. Or so I hope.