Easter Sunday

The sun will set in a little while, and another holy day will be memory and history.

We sat outside as much as we could today, but the brisk breeze kept forcing us to retreat inside. Sitting directly in the sun helped a bit, but it was still chilly, so we didn’t get as many outdoor hours as we had hoped. The dogs romped and rolled in the grass, and the birds were so numerous and so active, we were in awe. We watched all day for a hummingbird — a year ago today, we got our first hummingbird of the spring –but none ever appeared.

We had a fine meal of ham, broccoli & cheese casserole, mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, and a very nice pineapple casserole for dessert. I believe I exercised remarkable restraint in my consumption.

It wasn’t until just the other day that I realized that our bluebird house and the 2X3 it was attached to was missing in the tree wreckage from last weekend. I went out today and found the little house buried beneath a pile of pine boughs. It was damaged but salvageable, so I rescued it and will try, as chairman of the Avian Housing Authority (AHA!) to repair the roof.

Checking in at the Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey website, I learned that one of the monks, Brother Frederic,  just celebrated his 100th birthday. He has been in vows for 69 years out of that century. A happy belated birthday to Brother Frederic, who often works the front desk at the retreat house. I hope he enjoyed that good bottle of Biltmore wine.

During our time in the sun today, I read in my missal and I read some of a book by Kathleen Norris and I reread parts of Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain. So my mind was steeped in the thoughts of those who wrote pages and pages, none of which contained the sorts of thoughts that have bedeviled me in recent months. How does one look up from such books and watch the spotted dogs galivanting after the honeybees and the hawks riding high on their Easter thermals and then say, “Very well, then, I believe it all”? After all the doubts and questions and anger and disappointment and disillusionment and pat answers? How does that work?

There’s a saying among my people. “I just want to be mad.” And I suppose that describes how I’ve been feeling in regards to the Almighty and all that I’ve previously thought and believed about Him. I don’t want well-meaning Christians to try and convince me of anything, to debate me into submission, to persuade me with winsome words and sincere, scrunched-up faces. They don’t understand, because their beliefs are too ordered, too pristine, too nice. I’ve noticed that none of the churchyfolk whom I know personally have ever experienced deep sorrow or profound loss. They are very practiced at offering counsel on situations they’ve never faced themselves, like a woman I used to know who was a marriage & family therapist, and she herself had only been married a very short time and neither had children nor wanted to have children.

But still…

Perhaps it was the significance of the day, a holiday I can remember down most of my life, the egg hunts with my sister, even when we were teenagers and the chocolate rabbits (hollow, please) and later in my life the elaborate sunrise church services, and I can remember enough to be aware that this is the first Easter in my lifetime that no network television channel broadcast DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. I can remember Easter in little Japanese towns and in dingy bachelor apartments where friends invited me in for meals and in a little Catholic church near where I now live, where the fellow sitting next to me smelled like Marlboros and gin, a heady aroma I caught when he left the pew to go ring the little bells that signaled the Real Presence during Mass. All of these felt like Easter, and today felt like Easter, and so my mind roved.

And I read my missal and the Norris book and the Merton book, and I asked myself questions, and some of the questions went like this: What if I can never be settled about any of these things? What if I never recover something that tastes like real faith? What if I spend the rest of my life as some sort of bitter agnostic, who refuses to step down off the curb into Atheistville, but also refuses to get fooled again? What if every  morning is like the recent ones, mornings in which I open my eyes and think, What? Is anyone listening? Why do this? Why bother? If the Church I slowly and grudgingly but solidly came to believe was the one true faith is now presided over by an evil clown, and the clergy are mostly soft little fruits, and the mysteries and majesty have been bled out and replaced by vinegared Protestantism, and the nuns are all dykes who look like librarians at a Portland college, and the churches look like ski lodges decorated by preschoolers, and antiwhite social justice bullshit has replaced catechesis…why bother believing? The next rug is just as sure to get yanked out from under you, old man, ain’t it?

These questions chased me around all day, just like the wind did last weekend, and I was as restless and exhausted by suppertime as I was last week when the tree fell across the power lines.

And then the thought came to me.

Even if I can never be settled, even if the Church not only remains as it is but worsens dramatically, what then?

What am I to do?

What can I do?

The response came to me, and in the form of a memory.

The little wizened monk with the dancing, penetrating eyes known as Father James from the Trappist monastery in Kentucky, the priest who knew and served with Thomas Merton and who has listened to so many seeking souls unburden themselves through the decades, the small, cowled man with the soft voice and the amazingly strong handshake and a fondness for Ricola coughdrops…he said to me at the end of my first meeting with him, “You must be a man of prayer, S.K. You must be a man of prayer.” It was a command, a commission, a set of operational orders. But at the time he spoke those words, I had no idea what to do with them. And as is my habit in uncertain situations, I did nothing.

But today when I remembered again those words, spoken to me in a small room while other monks moved soundlessly through the hallway outside the door, I had another thought.

I can pray. I can speak intercessions into the listening air on behalf of other people, even animals. I can whisper with a sincere heart, Please grant mercy to this person. Please provide money for that person. Please reunite this man and his family, and please provide a home for that orphan.

And what if my worst fears are actually true? What if God is not listening? What if He doesn’t care, or if He doesn’t care to hear such petitions from me, personally, because of some defect in me, some marring of soul or unforgiven sin on my head?

I don’t believe these things are the case, but if they are, I can still pray for other people, because I believe the act of merely speaking their needs into the air is somehow beneficial to them. And to me. Can I prove this? No. Do I have empirical data that I can present? No.

Still, I believe this.

I thought about this for most of the afternoon. Would it be good for someone else if they were the object of my prayers? Would it help me (because in my honest moments, I will say that I want something out of my spiritual life…not money, not fame, but spiritual advancement)?

Can I be that man of prayer that Father James commissioned me to be?

Can I?

I hope each of you, dear readers, had a blessed and peaceful Easter.

~ S.K. Orr