(As we try to settle this blog into its new skin (links all working!) and I prepare to speak at The Relevant Conference this weekend, I’m thinking again of when I spoke last March in Arkansas… and the striking epiphany God gave that I pray to remember again … thus these words from last spring)
Holy ground is always what’s under the heel. The holy is always here.
That seemed blazingly apparent at the monastery, the monks with their whispering robes quieting all this loud world.
I had been invited, a Protestant, to come speak, to talk and move the tongue in some imitation of the wise, at a Catholic women’s Silent Lenten Retreat at the monastery’s retreat center and when he first heard of it, the Farmer had laughed gentle because wouldn’t a silent retreat be the perfect speaking venue for the woman with the thick, awkward tongue stammering nervous?
So I had gone.
And three sessions I had opened lips tentative, released words into the quiet, and these grace women had listened, carried words careful back to their still.
And five times a day, first early in dark, stars still stitching the great black sky open, the church bell had pealed, plea to come, come commune. So we had.
And they had: forty seven men who took a vow of poverty, chastity, obedience, to live a life of prayer, men who lived every day with definitive hard stops, set times of prayer, because they know that the hand of God that moves the galaxies wants our knees more than our hands, our worship more than our work.
I mean, there it had seemed obvious, God’s holiness.
No, we no longer have the Holy of holies veiled away in the Temple, no longer the Ark that couldn’t be touched or you’d be struck dead. Yes, we are the people who wonder, “What is holiness? Where is holiness?”
But here, in the church, called to prayer, it seemed clear: The sacred space was stained-glass. The hallowed was the hushed. Where candles flickered, His flame burned.
So I had thought and I had bowed and Brother Louis had shuffled into prayers with a cane and the church bell in the tower beat sure like a heart and there I could feel the steady pulse of the world: “Holy, Holy, Holy, the wholy earth is full of His glory.”
Brother Adrian had read certain from the book of Exodus and I could see the cloud descend on Mount Sinai and we had bent and prayed Psalm 136 and voices had risen with, “Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good.”
His love endures forever.
And when the still fell deep and we sit and let the silence come after the Psalm, the reflection and the adoration and all the inner swells with praise and my own pulse rings, “Glory, Glory, Glory….” that is when I first notice it.
I shake my head, stark wonder.
Why hadn’t I noticed this floor at noon prayers on Friday? Or at Vespers? Or at morning prayers?
How many times had I already come to pray here with the monks in the upper part of the church, and I hadn’t noticed the floor beneath my feet?
I stare down at tiles under the monks. Cork tiles. What seems a long time ago, when we were building our house, I had read much about cork floors.
How the cork’s structured like a honeycomb, each cubic centimeter forming millions and millions of cells. That is why cork floors absorb sound. I had read that the Library of Congress has a cork floor. Because cork floors are quiet floors, hushed floors.
I look down at the cork floor beneath these holy prayers.
I had only actually seen a cork floor just like this in one other place in the world.
In my kitchen.
On a hot night in August eight years ago, the Farmer and I had laid down tiles of cork across the floor of our kitchen. And in the middle of prayers at a Benedictine monastery in Arkansas, I kneel down and run my hand across a cork floor. A cork floor identical to my kitchen floor. These, the only two places I have ever seen a cork floor — under the pious prayers of the Benedictine monks… and under the loud and the raucous and the boisterous of my farmhouse kitchen.
The monks stand. We too rise to our feet. And our voices mingle, Psalm praise on the mouth, and the cloistered away do the greater work of the whole wide world by praying. In a moment ablaze, I feel the heat whisper of God, “Lo, I am with you always…. here in a monastery and there in your kitchen and I am Holy and I am everywhere and what is below your sole is always sacred and see, Child, see.”
Life is the holy experience and any given hour is hallowed ground and see, Child, see, and it’s a week now since a weekend with monks. I stand in this domestic cloister that shakes with noise, stand over a kitchen sink full, on a cork floor dirty, and there is no other way to see His face, hear His voice, feel His heat, but to pray right here in this sacred everday.
Because any old monastery will do.
I wash dishes clean.
“He that sees the beauty of holiness, or true moral good, sees the greatest and most important thing in the world … Unless this is seen, nothing is seen that is worth the seeing, for there is no other true excellency or beauty. ~Jonathan Edwards
Breathe in me,
O Holy Spirit,
that my thoughts may all be holy.Act in me,
O Holy Spirit,
that my work, too, may be holy.Draw my heart,
O Holy Spirit,
that I love but what is holy.Strengthen me,
O Holy Spirit,
to defend all that is holy.Guard me, then,
O Holy Spirit,
that I always may be holy.Amen.
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