When I was young, we sometimes visited my great-grandmother (GG) who lived in a Catholic nursing home in Washington D.C. As a protestant kid, Catholicism seemed like a different kind of world; the prayers, the nuns and priests, the crucifixes decorating all the walls, the sacramental wine (instead of grape juice). The nuns allowed us to stay on site in a little apartment, and we’d join GG for breakfast in a well-lit dining hall with the elderly residents eating their prunes, drinking their Sweet ‘N Low saturated coffee, as a priest led us through the morning prayer (“Hail Mary, full of grace…”). The sisters were embodiments of hospitality. Some were stern, but each possessed a spirit infused with compassion. One nun, Sister Rosemary, always greeted us with a bright smile, books, and gifts.
There is something profound in lifelong servitude, in renouncing the normalcies of life for one given completely to others, in service, worship, liturgy, hospitality. I am not Catholic, but I can respect the aspects of diligence to an ancient practice of communal living.
Kathleen Norris writes in “The Cloister Walk” about her years as an oblate (a layperson affiliated with monastic communities). For years, she frequented an abbey in search of solitude and community to explore her overwhelming doubts, to write from the peaceful rooms and gardens, and enjoy the depth of conversation found amongst the diversity of monks and priests and nuns. “My faith was non-existent, or at least deeply submerged, for so long a time, but liturgy pulled me back,” she writes. It was liturgy that renewed her broken, heavy soul, the reading of Psalms, the simple singing of songs, the morning and evening prayers. In the struggle as a writer, the hardships of her personal life, the “crucible” of doubt and disbelief, she writes: “It was the monks and their liturgy that kept me sane...the monastic liturgy plunges you into scripture in such a way that, over time, the texts invite you to commune with them, and can come to serve as a mirror...God wanted me empty, alone, and silent.”
The lifestyle of the abbey, of the monastics, is one in which every moment is infused with a kind of sacredness, the liturgy of the day affects the work, the readings are discussed, the songs continuously on the minds of all who have sung them. It’s such a practice where worship and life co-exist. And solitude is seen not as lazy or odd, but necessary. “We are starved for quiet, to hear the sound of sheer silence that is the presence of God himself,” writes Ruth Haley Barton (“Invitation to Silence”).
I think (perhaps) we’re quick to dismiss certain habits and practices that make us uncomfortable. So many modern western churches are epitomized by entertainment, alluring the masses with smoke machines and emotionally-charged music, trendy worship leaders, and provocative messages. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost the sacred; replaced quiet for ear-blasting music, solitude for densely packed, multi-million dollar venues, unspoken prayers for ornate, elaborate ones.
I’ve arrived at a place where I want nothing to do with that kind of setting. I am tired and I need the soul-lifting balm of liturgy, small community, solitude and silence. I need to write from a place of hope and healing, to be a peace poet (as Makoto Fujimura says), a process that will never arise in chaos.
Jesus gave us liturgy. He gave us a prayer to pray when words don’t form, when sadness overwhelms, when we don’t know what we can possibly say in our limited language. In the Anglican parish we sometimes attend, each petition is followed with, “Lord in your mercy, hear our prayers.” I don’t possess the adequate words to pray for the tragedies in Afghanistan and Haiti, beloved friends and strangers affected and afflicted by a pandemic. Sometimes the horror is too much, the pain too overwhelming. “Lord in your mercy…”
It’s in a return to simplicity we can be better practiced in hospitality, the kind of hospitality that welcomes without any intent to change, correct, or coerce. Henri Nouwen (a Catholic priest and writer) wrote in “The Wounded Healer,” “Hospitality is the virtue that allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger, with the intuition that salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveler. Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes closed-minded sectarians into interested recipients.”
This is the allure of the abbey, the Catholic nursing home, the small Anglican parish. Take and eat, sit and read, sing (or be still) and let the words of others who have gone before speak into your anxious souls. It is the calling of the writer, the ethos of the peace poet. Our writings lead to new liturgies, our hospitality a comfort for the weary. In the sacredness of the everyday, in the words or lack of words, in the liturgies, in the silence, we too can commune with the holy.