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.
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