Silent scenes
Since December, this newsletter has hosted a weekly adaptation of my Sunday sermon into essay form. It's also been a host for pictures showing the changing scenery of Vermont as the seasons and sub-seasons pass (I've suspected that many of you are here mostly for the pictures. Fine with me). Since I'm not preaching this week or next and have taken a road trip in love through regions of the Northeast and eastern Midwest into the South, I wanted to at least share a few scenes I found.
On Friday, this pilgrimage led to the former home of Thomas Merton, the Abbey of Gethsemani. It is still an active monastery that practices silence among its brothers. It would feel appropriate, then, to share those pictures in the spirit of silence, to remember that God does love our silence when it is chosen, that silence bears witness to things being enough in Him as they are.
This should invoke silence from me. But I am not a monk, and one of my vocations is preaching, so I can't help but share a few other thoughts first.
After days of camping and driving thousands of miles, seeing natural cathedrals and shrines to sports and the people who play them, we arrived early afternoon at the monastery in the central Kentucky hills. It was not until we were getting close that I realized I had not really read Merton in some time, nor had I felt connected to Christian mysticism lately. As we pulled up to park, I was not disappointed at the sight of the site, but I was slightly disappointed in myself. This long, labored pilgrimage to a place that inspired some of my favorite Christian writing was feeling a little underwhelming, not for its merits but mine; I had not put enough effort in to stay in touch with that which had been so vital in moments of spiritual crisis during my divinity school training.
I don't know why I've fallen out of touch with contemplative writing. I could blame it on my split with the psychedelic industry and its misuses of the term “mysticism” causing its invocation to set off an allergy, I could blame it on most of my energy being devoted towards the busyness of being a minister, I could blame it on my energy being spent on trying to say something each week that is intelligible and relational while so much mystic babble feels insular and esoteric, but I don't really think any of these are the reason. I don't know what the reason is. I just assume it is somehow my fault.
Whatever the reason, I found myself feeling a bit empty. Not sad or even deflated, just empty at the Abbey.
Nevertheless we went to the visitor center, walked the grounds, and found ourselves by the statues of Christ in the garden while his friends slept. In his darkest hour he had asked them to just stay awake and pray, not exactly a Herculean task, and they didn't. Whether they fell asleep because they were trying to pray or they simply were tempted into dreams rather than be with him in his pain or something else…whatever their excuse was, when Christ asked them to stay stay and watch and pray, they slept. And now we remember their sleep in infamy in bronze in the woods of Kentucky.
We returned from the statues, catching a man barely more than a dot in the distance sitting in a chair underneath a stand-alone cross on the hill. Passing by the cemetery, we made it back to the grounds in time to attend a midday prayer service. Our fellow visitors processed in silence into the church right before 2:15, when the silence of the grounds is daily broken by the brothers chanting Psalms and reading short scripture. As we sat in the back section of the echoey, long, pure white sanctuary that even a Calvinist could appreciate, the brothers walked in one by one, some a bit earlier than others, some together, none late, each seemingly occupied in some spiritual business going on inside themselves. They prayed, they sang, we matched pitch as best as novices could, and then they left. A few lingered to stay and pray.
And that was that. And then we left.
It's not that life has not felt alive, in fact quite the contrary. But there was something extra alive here. Even as a Protestant from a tradition without monasteries, there was an undeniable witness for me in the monks’ vocation. I couldn't possibly know any of the reasons or stories why these men were there, committed to daily routines so foreign to ours. But there they were, alive. And they were sacrificing anything that could possibly get in the way of being spiritually alive. So alive that silence was truly enough.
Shortly after we left the monastery, we learned in the car the headline news that a long-awaited psychedelic trial for MDMA had been rejected by the FDA. There was some synchronicity; Merton had played a role in me re-examining my thoughts about psychedelics, and so had this trial with the way survivors and whistleblowers had been treated horribly by the psychedelic industry. I'll have more to say sometime about that on my other newsletter, I'm just noting it here that I've been processing a lot around that in recent months.
But also in recent months I have been blessed with tremendous joy in love. Heck, I've been regularly downright goofy. But there has still been something missing from my own sense of vocation, something that I miss in my spirit that feels like it once was. Maybe this is just getting older and more burdened. I don't really know the reason. It probably takes less of a spiritual quest and more some boring lifestyle changes and readjustments and pulling myself away from noise long enough to read good writing again.
But whatever else, in the weariness on the Mount of Olives, I will try to watch and pray. I am sure I will still fall asleep and that Christ will still be in anguish at all that is wrong with this world and his beloved. And I will try again to let the silence be enough, for it is alive, a testimony to the Lord who creates it.
For those of you who regularly read this newsletter, thank you for your support over the last many months. Here are some pictures from the last week on the road. You might try them with silence.
