coming home

They say you can never come home. Depends on how you define "home". I've had many homes in my lifetime and some were harder to come back to than others. 

My home now is the convent. But that's not exactly accurate... my home now is a group of women who have chosen a life that's off the beaten path... a much simpler way of living than what I've found on this vacation. 

Specifically I'm referring to the act of living and moving and being in a complicated world. My world now is way less complicated than it was before, not just in not having to decide what to wear in the morning, but in the intangible emotional choices. 

I find I can no longer hold together the various strands of subtle innuendos and personality quirks, hostile grudges from past wounds, constant struggles to carry (and manage) the baggage of childhood. I say the wrong things in the wrong places. (Well, actually that's not new for me.) But it's different now, because for the most part, it's unwillingly and unwittingly done. 

The women I live with have quirks in their personalities, of course. But we are more transparent. In the convent there's no need to posture or impress, no need for lots of words to describe the indescribable... and as a result, there's no need to posture or impress the outside world either.

So, for the most part, I have little or nothing to say. Except when I open my mouth to make an observation... and experience the backlash that it was the wrong thing at the wrong place and the wrong time. Then I'm awash in guilt for not knowing better, not remembering some topic was taboo ground, not discerning that one person needs assurance, while another needs to hear a truth nobody else will tell them. It's a complicated world and I no longer live in it.

So... I'm at the airport, waiting for my flight to my less complicated world. They have free wireless in this airport, and I'm taking advantage of the novelty of being plugged into my email (and the internet) in a public place. I've just experienced a hectic week of wedding preparations... parties and receptions and rehearsal dinners, the wedding itself, and the reception and another party yesterday. Each individual event was carefully planned and lovingly executed, the bride and groom are delightful people with a wonderful array of friends and family. But when you put all those events and people together, it was exhausting. 

This coming week I'll be doing some of it all over again as my sisters and I prepare for another Life Profession next Saturday. Not so many parties, but certainly the excitement of the preparations will be the same. They've just announced my flight has been delayed another hour. More time to enjoy the novelty of free internet and airport cuisine.

stalling

While I was in Newport, I went to Sunday services with my friend. A beautiful little church (little only by St. Bart's standards) was in the midst of summer chaos: a priest in charge, a retiring organist, lots of parishioners on vacation... yet the Spirit still moved through the aisles, in the Nave, and spilled out into the coffee hour afterwards. Spirit always seems to move in chaos. I forget that when I'm stuck in the eye of the storm.

The preacher/priest-in-charge did not forget, though. Her job is to hold the boat together and to help her parish navigate through difficult waters ahead. Her texts were pertinent to that: The angel of the Lord speaking to Elijah, who had run away to the cave in the mountain, "What are you doing here?" And Elijah giving his blow-by-blow response, "I've done my best. Nobody listens. They broke all your furniture. All the other prophets are dead, and now they're trying to kill me."

She outlined the usual things such a prophet might feel: the sense of despair at being all alone in the work for God, discouragement, fearfulness, dog-tiredness... standing at the edge of the abyss. Two choices then: hide in the cave or step out into the chaos.

She spoke of the concept of chaos, from very real physical tumult to the simple busyness of each day's activities; how easy it is to get caught up in our obligations and cares, to feel physically battered like tropical storms batter the coastline. She returned to the reading from 1st Kings. God was not in the wind, or the earthquake or the fire. God was in the still. small. voice. "What are you doing here Elijah?"

So... we are called back out. Into the chaos. She noted that in the hymn: Jesus calls us o're the tumult, it never said Jesus calls us out of the tumult. Life, she said, is not a fairy tale, and (contrary to what some believe) the Gospel does not call us to live happily ever after.

Yet the tumult wearies us. When I am weary, I am more easily prone to fear. 

Fear... we each respond to fear in different ways. Some snap at everyone around them, some are paralyzed and cannot function. Others become obsessed with controlling what can be controlled. None of it is pretty. Yet necessary. To find the stillpoint which is God, is to know after all, that God is with us. The cave may seem like safety, but that is also illusion. Risk is the key.

I thought about their little church, struggling to make it through another storm. But the words were meant for me as well. Some of you know I draw cartoons. I do it for the fun of it, but I also do it for deeper, less understood reasons. I've been in the safety-cave around this activity since the last series. (Mainly because the next step gets a whole lot stickier, and I am afraid of being glued to some place I don't want to be.) Yet, like Elijah, I keep hearing the question "What are you doing here?" Stalling, God. That's what I'm doing here.

Home soon...

Home soon... tomorrow afternoon.
Long trip. Good retreat (I think) in Oregon... new friends, new ties to the west coast.

It strikes me as odd that I've not had "the need" to post while I've been away. For one, not much opportunity (until I reached my son's house) and for two... I'm now on what's known in the convent as family time. Not rest and retreat, (our equivalent of vacation) because as everyone knows, family time is not a retreat, neither is it restful. Those exact words from another nun were perplexing to me at first, although I laughed at the time. But now I get her drift. Life in the convent is different enough to make life in the outside world seem pretty weird.

It's been a weird visit. I'm sure some of it's the nun-thing, some the time difference (3 hours), some the fact that even though both my son and daughter-in-law took vacation time to be off, my son still pretty much sticks to his night shift schedule, and my daughter-in-law spends a lot of her time online while watching TV. That's not a problem. I don't need to be entertained. I have my knitting and my son gave me a good book to read. It's something else.

Nobody wants to make a decision about what we should do, where we should go, what TV we should watch... and once a decision is somewhat made, then there's a whole lot of resistance and/or argument about it. I'm so used to stating my position on an issue and then going with the consensus, that I have no understanding of the nuances of "I don't care what we do" to mean "I don't want to do that." Or... "I will make you pay if we do that." It's disorienting. I'm bouncing along thinking everything is just fine and then notice somebody's unhappy. Or so it seems.

These kids snap at each other. I have no doubt there's true affection between them, I've seen that as well, but the whole kindness for its own sake thing has eluded them. It's been so long since I've been in a relationship with just one other person, I can't remember if I was the same way. Probably... the apple doesn't fall far.

The dog seems to like me better this time.