Ascension
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Personal, Unedited and Uncut musings about whatever I’m living.
February 12, 2017
In January, 2017, headed back to the U.S. from Mexico, I arrived in Houston only to discover that my connecting flight to Philly had been cancelled. It was an early flight that would have arrived in the city before dark, at a time that I could have taken the train and arrived at my place before 8:30 p.m. It’s normally coming to Mexico that I encounter cancellations, having to layover in a hotel, a nice one if the airline is responsible for the cancellation, just a place to lay my head if it’s beyond the airline’s control. Almost everything is beyond the airline’s control.
I asked if I could get a flight into Newark, LaGuardia or even JFK. But every flight from Houston to the east coast had been cancelled because of a “predicted” 3 inch snowfall. I was put on stand-by for an 11:00 a.m. flight the following morning, a flight, I imagined, already overbooked, and then confirmed on a flight that would get me into Philly at 11:00 p.m., the following night.
Thor in Egypt, Akilah t’Zuberi – from Paseos de Poder, un viaje en tele Pan-Africana, March 2016, Oaxaca, Mx.
February 18, 2017
I started by letting my children know that I would not be back until sometime the following night, and only then if the flight was not overbooked. I had already decided if the airline asked if anyone would be willing to give up a seat (minimum $300.) plus hotel, a nice one, I would volunteer; then, because I am familiar with Houston’s airport, I bought a sandwich, grabbed a green tea latte, and headed to a terminal that wasn’t too crowded with disenchanted travelers. By early afternoon, I made peace with a one night stay in Houston.
I took out my Kindle and settled upon a book that I had ordered two days before, but had only managed to read the first 3 or 4 pages of the introduction: The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living, by Rory McEntee and Adam Bucko.
After I finished the introduction by Thomas Keating, I turned off my Kindle and focused on my meal, reflecting on a 2010 silent retreat at the Jesuit Center, in Wernesville, Pennsylvania. Keating’s introductory words helped me to recall how, on the seventh and last day of the retreat, I anxiously got in my car, turned on my cell phone and the radio, loud, to head back to Philadelphia. A few miles from the Jesuit Center, nestled on 240 meticulously cared for acres, just fifteen minutes beyond a deafening silence that I could not have imagined missing, I got a clear call to the contemplative life. I drove the remaining miles without music.
Walking into my house, I faintly remembered what it looked and felt like. I surveyed the living room, walked through the dining room to put my suitcase down to unpack later, sat down to rest on the side of the bed. This house, I thought to myself, is noisy. It was fine before I left a week ago. Had I shifted into another vortex or what?
Sitting on the train between Penn Station and Trenton, NJ. The week after I arrived in Philadelphia from Oaxaca, I made a trip to New York City to buy some fabric for a quilt. I had timed the journey perfectly. I would have been back at my house by 4:30 p.m. On the return trip, midway between Penn Station (NYC) and Trenton Transportation Center, where I would have arrived 10 minutes before the regional train to Philadelphia, an announcement was made that we were being delayed. We sat on the tracks for over 45 minutes. I missed the train in Trenton, and didn’t arrive home until 6:15!
February 19, 2017
In the days following my return from the retreat, I became increasingly aware of how I drowned out silence, simply out of habit. Sometimes I would allow myself to be taken to the past, or to some idealistic future. It was chatter, I soon recognized, that distracted me from the present moment. I am not alone in saying that I have probably missed, although wasted would be a better word, most of my life, living in this way. And this lifestyle, outside of the present moment, as I was recently informed, is the cause of much suffering. My experience is a witness to the validity of those words.
Over the next few months, I would attempt days of silence, informing frequent callers that I would not be answering the telephone. I made certain that I wouldn’t have to make a Target or a Whole Check run. I continued in this manner over the next year trying to establish a day or two out of the week that I would dedicate to silence. But I didn’t get too far. My life was not conducive to being “In Silence,” as the card that I had worn around my neck read for those 7 days in Wernesville.
February 21, 2017
When I finally boarded the flight to Philadelphia, I was halfway through an exploration and explanation of the new monasticism. Over the next three days of jet lag, bitter cold and a long list of “Things to Do,” before the conclusion of a brief 4-week stay, I finished the book and meditated on some of the authors’ words about this new monastic movement.
March 2, 2017
Thomas Keating from the “Epilogue,” The New Monasticism:
“Since most people are not called or attracted to seek union with God within the structures of traditional monastic life, means of reaching divine union in the context of the immense diversity of life in the world must be created. Contemplative prayer and nonconceptual meditation seem to be the most helpful means of accessing the divine presence and of establishing a relationship with Ultimate Reality in the midst of the ups and downs of ordinary life.”
March 3, 2017
This is the call I have been waiting for: “Means…must be created.” I’ve been preparing, unknowingly, to respond to this call for most of my life. I have pieced together and lived an alternative (to what passes as normal,) lifestyle since I was a teenager; life outside the box, straddling the border, in the margins, but most often not giving a shit how the mainstream defined my locality.
March 4, 2017
One of the many gifts that ACOL offers is the “call” to be my “given” Self, to accept who I AM. What I have come to love about the human experience is the power to re-create and expand my experience. While I thoroughly enjoy needle arts, stain-glass sculpture and, of course, gardening, the call to create a unique contemplative practice, I feel in my bones, is a call to create the masterpiece! This is the ultimate alchemy.
The new monasticism allows us to come as we are.
Married, single, polyandrous, polygamous, widowed, single-parents; men and women, queer, transgendered; indigenous, brown, yellow, black, white. We can live in apartments, condos, in houses, in the city or in the burbs. We are free to choose celibacy, while others are free to discover how sex, its meaning and purpose, the act itself, radically shifts in the light of the commitment to spiritual transformation. Some of us come to the new monastic movement from mainstream religions. Others bring no religious background at all. Some bring a belief in God, some, a belief in a benevolent Universe, some, in spirit guides and ancestors.
It requires only that we are committed to spiritual transforming our lives (actually that’s another way of saying it asks for everything).
This is a great time to be on this planet.
