Читать книгу One Priest’s Wondering Beliefs - John E. Bowers - Страница 8

When I first realized I had begun to wander theologically, away from the orthodox compound, I did have the wits to take a quick look around and make note of the spiritual foundations that had carried me thus far, to this place I seemed to be now leaving. It may be useful to point out to you as we begin, the spiritual foundation stones that sustained me through thirty-four years of ministry, and then when I retired, launched me into this spiritual pilgrimage.

Theological Foundations

I can still remember, though not with absolute clarity any more, the days of my seminary years, especially the middler year. The church, particularly the Episcopal Church, had been important in my life from the age of eight. I became as active as a child and teen could be in a very small, struggling congregation all those years. My dad had been an acolyte in his tender years, so I was one now. I was carefully building up my understandings, what it was about, how it worked (the it here is sedulously undefined). I was a lector long before we had lectors, a watcher of priests, and rarely even a preacher. It was equally observed and concluded by all that I was headed for the ministry. So it came about that in that horribly dark and painful middler year of seminary all of my tenderly laid, childish foundations were being carefully and methodically demolished, torn down, block by block. Not maliciously, but lovingly and very deliberately, with what felt like sledge hammer blows. It had to be if I was to become a theological priest who really thought and cared about Christian and spiritual foundations.

That was an incredibly painful year. I went to seminary expecting to fill in small gaps and round off unshaped edges; instead the center was being ripped out of me and carefully reconstructed, but this time with sound, mature and intellectually competent, well crafted, state-of-the-art foundation stones. And that foundation was sound enough to sustain me in building my spiritual life alongside others through my thirty-four years of active ministry. Good foundation stones. Stones well-jointed together into a solid reliable, and very functional, quite orthodox (though some might suggest “flaming-liberal”) foundation for a serviceably theological and spiritual dwelling. It has served me quite well through my ministry. But as I neared, and have now lived into retirement, when orthodoxy is no longer more important (as a professional and sworn orthodox priest of the church) to me than understanding the spiritual world in which I have found myself, I have noticed, underneath the moss that’s grown on the north side of those foundation stones (and on and other sides as well) that the weather has finally gotten to them. Spiritual winds have etched and eroded them. Like old sandstone they’re getting a little soft and crumbly, at least around the edges. I’ve studied hard through my thirty-four years of ministering to keep them well tuck-pointed, sturdy, soundly jointed. And to keep them current, consistent with the latest and best discoveries and understandings of the Scriptures. And then, some cumbersome spiritual experiences have accumulated too. And as I’ve lived into my retirement life, taken time to look around, to ponder how these unexpected and fairly extra-orthodox spiritual experiences that have tumbled into my life without my asking, and occasionally on request, how these might fit in, I’ve noticed that the old, carefully constructed and fairly orthodox foundation no longer contains or underpins what I discover is now building up in me. So I find myself re-examining those old stones, and how they are put together, and what stands atop them as my spiritual dwelling place. I find myself quietly, reflectively wondering. What I am gradually coming to discern across the decades of study, and the decades of the spiritual experiences I have accumulated, or which have tumbled in on me unrequested, is that the spiritual house I now live in, whose dimensions and shapes I can see only dimly, all that no longer fits the old, carefully laid foundations. It is all much broader, and airier, and far less clearly defined. I suppose some will fretfully, perhaps fearfully, suggest that I have “lost my faith” (whatever that means); but I will respond, “No, not lost. Simply grown spiritually beyond the old foundations.” Though I must confess that those old foundation stones, seeming to have been heaving slowly out of the earth beneath my feet with all the freezes and thaws of my life, are now fairly vague and shapeless. I feel them with my toes rather than see them. So I will now lay before your view as many of the older ones as I can find, so that you may comprehend the shape of this evolving structure within which I find myself.

Giving Myself to Christ

I cannot recall the details any more. It probably was in my fifteenth year that I went off to my first and only Senior High Conference. We wrestled with Martin Buber’s latest work and with some other classroom kinds of issues. And I befriended Karl, a fellow pipe smoker; I was probably much readier to associate with like-minded males at that age than girls with funny shaped skins, though both Karl and I were rather taken (I should say “smitten”) with “Peaches,” as she chose to be called (but in all likelihood we were no more smitten with her than all the rest of the testosterone-drenched teenage males in that week). “Peaches” in a swim suit was a sight to behold! The conference was filled with all the usual activities, but one impacted me more than all the rest put together. On Friday evening we had a guest speaker, an evangelist who had just returned from missionary work in South American. He told us about his experiences, and somewhere in the course of the evening he launched into his evangelist mode. Billy Graham could have done no better. I have no recollection of what he said to us. But I can clearly see the picture he evoked in my head. Over the altar in the tiny mission church where I was growing up was a copy of the very famous painting of Christ standing outside the door (to the heart, of course), lantern raised, knocking and seeking entrance. I can’t say whether he referred to that picture specifically, or whether whatever he was saying called that picture to my consciousness. But I clearly remember seeing that picture in my mind’s eye. And he called upon us to give our Selves, our lives to Christ. And I did that night. We were instructed to spend the rest of the night in silence. And I can recall going back to my room with my three roommates, myself in tears. I’d never been to an old-fashioned revival, but I now suspect I had just experienced a not-so-Episcopal version of that. I had given myself to Christ, and although I suspect that my choice to reach for the ministry had preceded that evening, that evening certainly sealed the decision. I can look back and realize now that I was far too young to soundly make that decision, but it was made, nonetheless, and quite irrevocably, as it turned out.

Caldey Abbey

I jump far ahead. I did my first and only sabbatical in 1996, the thirty-first year of my ministry. I had already been digging my way into understanding the ancient Celtic church and its spirituality for four years, and I was hoping for a sabbatical to spend some weeks living in a community that was trying to live out a Celtic spirituality. After a global search I concluded there was no such community. Early in my search a friend who knew my sabbatical hopes handed me an article about a Cistercian monastery in Wales with the comment that I might spend part of my sabbatical there. I read the article; the community was uncompromisingly Cistercian, which is to say, very Roman Catholic, not in the least Celtic. No, I was looking for Celtic and was not interested. But for some unfathomable reason I filed that article in an obscure folder. I was at the same time involved with a handful of people working to weave a network of people interested in “Celtic Christian spirituality” (I put that in quotes because that phrase was, and still is, very ill-defined.) We called it Anamchairde (ah-Nam-CAR-dja), Gaelic for “soul-friends.” We developed a newsletter. And then one day I got a letter from a fellow named Gildas. He had been handed a copy of our newsletter by a friend of his, one Nona Rees, and was very interested in what we were trying to do. He was a monastic, had taken a vow of poverty, and so was limited in what he could contribute or ways he might help our effort. But he wanted to help. Something about the way he worded that letter made his offer of help sound very personal, as though aimed directly to me, and very immediate. Though he was responding to the newsletter (my name was on its masthead along with seven others), his response and his offer of help seemed as though it was written to me personally, and warmly. I noticed the return address. Could it be? I dug into my files and found that buried article. Not only was this the same monastery, but the face staring at me from the cover page was Gildas himself. Now that was damned spooky. I felt triangulated, hit by the same message from two different and unrelated directions, and I had by then in my life concluded to pay attention when I was triangulated. So I responded to Gildas’s letter. We exchanged letters until I began to discern that perhaps I was intended to spend some sabbatical time in that monastery, Caldey Abbey on a tiny island off Tenby on the south coast of Wales. It seemed that Gildas was very into the study of Celtic stuff himself, and that Caldey Island had its own Celtic heritage, had been home to a Celtic monastic community and to several important Celtic saints, notably Illtyd and Samson of Dol. The pieces of my sabbatical felt like they were coming together, and Caldey was at the center. I did go there and lived among the monks for five weeks. That sounds like a short time, but living amongst austere Cistercians it is not. I was beginning to write my own small book on Celtic spirituality, and intended to use those five weeks to complete the work. It turned out to be exactly the right place to do that work.

The Cistercians were a reform movement within the Benedictine monks in the twelfth century. Some monks thought the Benedictines were becoming too worldly, and felt the need to purify and intensify their monastic life, to get back to the basics. They still worship seven times a day in chapel, beginning the day with the hour-long psalm vigil at 3:30am and ending the day with compline at 7:30pm. And they cram Bible-study, lectio divina1 and a couple of community exercises into each day, along with an afternoon of physical labor assigned by the abbot. It is a disciplined, demanding, and very austere life. I remember during one conversation with Gildas in my room, as we talked, how he looked longingly at the face-bowl in my room; it was a luxury forbidden to him. His cell contained a bed, a desk, a chair, and a hook to hang his wardrobe on. Nothing else! This is austerity. I was assigned a room in the guest quarters inside the monastery walls; mine was the only room in the monastery with a single electrical outlet so I could plug in my computer, or alternatively, the small electric heater they offered me. The monastery is unheated, and the Atlantic winds can be pretty chill in mid-spring. That day Gildas told me that the most terrifying moment of his whole life happened in the moments after he’d taken his final, life-long vows and went back to his cell, and as he stood there and looked around, he’d said to himself, “This is it. This is the rest of my life!” He had been told that his cell would teach him everything he needed to know, and over the years he had learned that was right.

Gildas was the cook for the monastery while I was there, and the food was as austere as his cell. I was never hungry in those five weeks, but the wildest menu item I had was on the Feast of Pentecost when we had a dessert (a rare occurrence) of a thin slice of fruit cake and a bottle of ale. Theirs is not a vegetarian diet, but meat or fish usually happened only once a week.

Within the discipline of this kind of austerity interesting things began to happen for me spiritually. I was fascinated that I was able to get into their worship routine in only three days. I missed the vigil very rarely, though after the vigil when the monks went back to their cells and began their day with Bible study and lectio divina. I had to roll back into the sack for another hour’s sleep; but then I was writing until 10:00 at night. At first the frequent worship was an intrusion into my writing schedule, and I sometimes resented it. But I intuited that this worship discipline was essential to the writing I was doing, giving support and meaning to my writing. Within a week and a half I realized that the worship was no longer an intrusion, but instead had become the structure for my day and my writing effort. Without it I would have been floundering. And I was enjoying the worship, mainly the singing of the psalms. As Gildas walked me down to the boat to the mainland on the day I was leaving he told me that the monks had commented that I had fit into their life better than any other guest they’d had. For myself I had learned that I could probably be content living that monastic life. But while it might have been beneficial to me spiritually, I don’t think it would have been healthy for me over all. Yet I am quite aware that those five weeks, living on a tiny island on the south coast of Wales with fifteen monks, became one of the most important foundation stones in the spiritual house I am building right now. I learned that there is much more to spiritual life than I had been taught, and that it is not bounded by what can be found in the Scriptures, which I had also been taught.

In one conversation with Gildas (we had only three in the whole five weeks. Cistercians do not take a vow of silence, but their rule is of no unnecessary conversation, and that makes for a whole lot of silence) he told me that he had learned that one of the best times of the day for prayer was at dusk, just before dawn and just afer sunset, and that the chapel in the old fifteenth-century Benedictine ruins up the hill, kept barely usable with a still-consecrated altar, was one of the best places to pray, particularly just before dawn. So one morning when I was fairly awake, after the vigil I betook myself up the hill to the old ruins. It had been raining lightly, and the wind was still brisk. It was well before dawn so the cloudy sky was quite dark, and I had no flashlight with me. In the near blackness, the wind blowing globs of water off the tree limbs onto me, I made my way up the hill, around the mill pond and into the old courtyard, searching out the door into the choir where the Benedictines had sung their psalms five hundred years before. There was barely enough light inside to make things out, but my eyes gradually became accustomed to the blackness. I sat in the choir to pray: prayers of silence, of listening. I had become stalled in my writing, having nearly completed my articles on Celtic spirituality, but stuck trying to compose several prayers in the Celtic style for which I had no copy in Carmina Gaedelica. I was somewhat frustrated because time was running out for me on Caldey; but I was not praying that night about those prayers, or anything else. This was listening-prayer time. After a while I became aware of a strange sound in the choir. It took me a moment to identify it. The sound of the monks’s robes as they processed into chapel for Compline! (For all the other hours the monks straggled into the chapel individually, but at Compline they were coming from their daily chapter meeting and processed silently in order of seniority into the chapel; their robes made a very identifiable swishing sound as they came in together.) I actually looked around to see if the Cistercians were coming! They were not. But now there was a presence in the room with me, a warm and friendly presence. Perhaps the fifteenth-century Benedictines? As that sound diminished I realized that it was raining lightly outside, and what I was hearing was the sound of the rain on the slate room. And yet there was still a presence in the choir with me, as though the medieval monks were praying with me; not a spooky feeling, but the warm and friendly presence of monks appreciating my joining their silent choir. I sat for some moments wondering when suddenly I had to fish a frantic pencil stub out of my pocket and a scrap of paper, as words came tumbling out. It was one of the prayers that had stumped me for days, and it poured out into notes that were almost in finished form. I marveled! That prayer had been given to me; it came through my hand but not out of me. (Oh, I can appreciate hearing the sound of lightly falling rain as monks processing in coupled in the workings of the writer’s unconscious mind, but this plainly felt like something other than those. And who says that anything in life must have only a single cause?) I wondered for a few minutes, as the sense of that presence gradually evaporated and I was again alone in the chapel. I decided to move a dozen feet into the sanctuary. That was a spookier space: on the left side was a large door, overhung with a black curtain, leading into the ruined dormitory where it was rumored that the black monk still wandered, searching for the silver and gold altar vessels secreted during a Viking raid and never recovered. But it was starting to lighten just a bit, and through the window over the altar I could see the tree limbs outside shaken by the blustering winds. I sat in the silent sanctuary a few minutes, reaching again for that listening prayer, when suddenly I once more had to grab my pencil stub and paper and again the words of a second prayer came tumbling out, again nearly polished. And again it felt like a gift given. By now the space once again felt empty except for me, but comfortable, no longer spooky. I went down to join the monks for Prime in chapel.

I was fairly exhausted in my work toward the end of my stay in the monastery, and my work was far enough along that I could give myself the luxury of a day off. I pocketed some fresh fruit at breakfast and begged from Gildas a small hunk of cheese and a bottle of water, and told him I was going off alone to Sandtop Bay and would not be back for noonday meal or chapel until supper or Compline. So after mass I bundled up and made my way up the hill and across the top of the island, a mile or less, to Sandtop Bay on the west end of Caldey. It had been blowing a gale the day before so there were still high winds and the seas were up. Sandtop is fairly exposed to the Atlantic winds so I had to search a while to find the spot protected enough from the winds and blowing spray. The bay is protected on two sides with seventy or so foot cliffs, and on the backside with high, steep sand dunes which in a high wind can be difficult to negotiate. And this day the wind was coming in from just about due west, the unprotected direction. I searched for twenty or more minutes before I chanced upon a small location just barely protected, and fortunately furnished with the only grass-tufted hummock that provided a comfortable seat. And there I besat myself for four or five hours. What happened to me there is not very describable. I watched and I listened and I smelled. What I sensed was God-at-play.

The combers rolled in by the minute, through the hours, steadily, breaking into foam a hundred yards out, drawing lines across the narrow bay, swiftly marching row after row onto the beach, one upon another upon another endlessly, relentlessly, each rushing up the beach and hissing into the sand, disappearing as it began its retreat and the next took its place, rushing and hissing. It was marvelous. A show, as if staged just for me, as though I were not there to see it at all; only God. The edges of each wave on either side of the beach crashed against the cliffs, throwing spray high into the air where the winds caught and tossed it up, over the tops of the cliffs high above the hissing sands. The wind was strong enough that when standing I had to lean into it, and then it would gust, teasing me, trying to throw me off-balance and onto the ground. And the winds carried mists of salt spray onto my lips and my eyebrows and my hair. I had tasted salt spray years before, deep at sea, riding a Navy destroyer; it is not an unpleasant taste and sensation: refreshing, cool—gritty and cleansing. Wet. The sky was a marvelously deep blue, the color of the skies in Edinburgh when the breeze is refreshingly cool but the winds high aloft are crisply cold, and the clouds are white puffs of cotton scudding across. Gulls and other birds I did not know relished the winds, took delight in riding them, soaring higher and higher and then swooping down across the beach, laughing to each other as they coasted up over the sand dunes and then turned back seaward to take the ride again; a play-day for them, searching if by chance there might come an edible tidbit to be snatched from one of the waves.

I could write pages to describe that day, but by now you may have the notion of it. It was refreshing. Cleansing. Enervating. A taste of the very essence of life. A pleasure for the ears and eyes and nose and skin, and even the tongue. Of course it had come just when I needed it in my work. But I think it would have been the same even if I’d not needed it so badly, if I could have just paid attention. God was playing, and letting me watch. Perhaps taking delight in my pleasure. I knew of a certainty that I was in Her presence that day, and there was nothing needing to be said or heard, by me or by Her. Eventually the chill of the wind crept into my bones and I had to move. I made my way to the other side of the beach, to the cliffs where there were several small caves and the waves crashed at my feet. But the magic was ebbing away. (John O’Donohue tells us that the soul is a shy presence that can not be aggressively hunted. It does not want to be seen with too much clarity, but rather seems much more at home in a candle-like kind of light that has a hospitality for shadows and wonderful openings in the darkness.) I think when I crossed that beach looking for more, I became the hunter-too-aggressive, and whatever opening I had been cosseting that day turned shy, and closed gradually away. I made my way back up the sand dunes collapsing underneath each footfall, and across the top of the island, and back down to the abbey. What a glorious day. It still remains crystal clear in my memory. It taught me how to find God.

The legends are very clear that Celtic saints (not martyrs but holy men and women) almost always lived part of their lives within the monastic community, within the circle of the monastery, but also had a place away, a dysert a desert place to which they retreated for hours or days or weeks or months after the model of the Egyptian Desert Fathers. They lived both in community amongst their fellow monastics with all the interpersonal stresses that necessarily entails, and away, in isolation, in the extreme austerity of a crude hermitage embraced by and embracing the natural world where God can whisper quietly and be heard. I understood why they did that, and how rewarding that would be.

Early in my stay I became aware that at the vigil in the abbey there was usually one other sitting near me in the nave of the chapel where we non-monks resided during the hours. A woman! Almost always there before me, she left very quickly after the last “Amen.” She was there only for vigil, very rarely for mass, no other hours. It was dusky in the chapel at the vigil hour, barely light enough to softly sing the psalms, so I could not make her out well. But she headed quickly out the nave door into the dark night, while I always went the other direction through the cloister and on into the guest quarters and my room to toss off a few more knots of sleep in the before-morning-cold. I had been there more than three weeks when one morning as I came in and made my way past the choir toward my accustomed place, she moved toward me and extended a note into my hand, retreating to her accustomed place. The abbot rapped; we began the vigil. I surreptitiously read my note. She was inviting me to tea! I scratched out a note of acceptance and as we passed in leaving I gave it to her. Not a word spoken. I cornered Gildas and asked about her. He was delighted that she had invited me; she had asked him about me, and was curious about my work. He gave me directions to her place. Turned out that Sr. Dolores was a solitary, had been a nun, an educator, for many years head administrator of a large school, but during her sabbatical had discerned that she was being called to become a solitary who lives alone, in minimal contact with others. She had had to leave her order, requiring a papal release, to live out this calling, and had been accorded this small cottage to live in by the abbot. Her story is too involved to tell you now; I only want you to understand that within an hour’s conversation I knew she was a person with whom I could safely confide my soul. I told her of that experience in the chapel of the ruins; and she confided to me that she had experienced presences on this island as well, in a specific place, on the path behind her cottage near the pathway to the chapel door. Gildas told me that he too sometimes experienced presences, on the path to the top of the hill, above the old ruins and near the top; and also where Sr. Dolores experienced them, and occasionally in other places. My experience was not crazy. It was not even odd!

I spoke of that night in the chapel of the ruins when I felt the presence(s), and shortly was given one, then a second prayer for my book. That happened to me twice more. After I had completed my stay at Caldey Abbey I crossed over to Ireland to deliberately seek out holy places there. (Ireland reputedly has more ruins per square inch than anywhere else in the world; a few of them HAVE to be holy.). My first stop was at Glendalough, the site of an ancient monastic city south of Dublin in the Wicklow Mountains, a particularly lovely area in the particularly lovely island of Ireland. Glendalough was founded by St. Kevin (Coemgen) in the sixth century and quickly became one of the more important schools and monastic cities in Ireland. Today it is one of the best preserved of the old monastic cities. But today it is badly infested with annoying clouds of tourists by the busload. Glendalough (“Glen of the two lakes”) is renowned as a holy place, but, infested with tourists, holy it is not. You have to be out early in the morning in order to have enough time before the busses arrive, or else late in the afternoon, after the busses have left. It took me the first of my two days there to learn that. So on the second day, out early but with my soul anticipating the horde of tourists, I found no thin places in the monastic city ruins that morning. Late morning, with a little food in my backpack for lunch, I made my way a mile and a half or so up the hill where I hoped the bussed-in tourists would not have time to come. I came to a small circle of stones on the hillside, supposedly the foundation of a hermit’s cell, traditionally thought of as the hermitage cell of St. Kevin himself. An almost complete circle of stones sunken into the ground. Perhaps a monk’s hermitage cell. Possibly even Kevin’s. It was on a lovely wooded hillside fairly high above the upper of the two loughs. The view was exquisite, almost breathtaking. If I’d been Kevin, I’d have chosen just this site. I mused a while, admiring the views in several directions. And then I carefully selected a stone to perch upon where I could gaze at the lough and slip into my listening-prayer, the very thing Kevin might have done. I was not too long in silence when suddenly once again I was compelled to dig into my backpack for a pencil stub and paper scrap and scribble out the words that came, not from my head but through my fingers. There on the paper was another prayer I’d needed, though I hadn’t been particularly troubling over it. As I was scribbling a young man came climbing by. He paused and glanced at me, then climbed unspeaking on up the hill. As he came back down a little later he said hello but passed on. When I went down the hill I discovered him and his wife and baby picnicking at the bottom. I stopped and introduced myself; he was a just-published writer who had recognized what I was doing and did not want to interrupt. They shared their lunch with me, and I mine with them. A delightful time. Another gift of a prayer.

There was only one more time this happened to me, though I had offered myself to the opportunity many times. I was nearing the end of my sabbatical time. The moment when Nancy would join me for our reunion and vacation was looming, and my excitement with it. I was in the Burren, a unique area of limestone mountain-desert in County Clare, the west of Ireland. Nancy and I had been here on our honeymoon a decade before. Two places I was seeking, the small fishing village of Doolin, a hangout for local folk musicians, and Corcomroe Abbey. I cannot tell you much about that abbey. We had sought it out simply because it was in the Burren, and on the map. But it had turned out to have a particular draw for Nancy. It is an interesting ruin, particularly for the carvings of heads on every corbel and every other offered place (while the Celts had not been head-hunters, they did believe that the head was the seat of courage, and so usually a warrior kept the heads of brave enemies he’d taken, in hope that the courage would pass onto him), but Corcomroe had not spoken to me with any power. This day I sought it out anyhow, reason unknown. Maybe just filling time until . . . Maybe because it was Nancy’s place and I was drawing back toward her. Whatever! I was there. I walked about, trying to feel the place, but getting nothing in particular. The cemetery is still active. Eventually I sought out a cool place, sitting on the ground against the cemetery wall, just watching as the tombstones ruminated their cud. And suddenly, once again the pencil stub, the scrap of paper, the words tumbling out, and another prayer. Maybe it was just my unconscious mind. But by now I had grown leary of that too-easy rationalization. I felt that God had caught me once again, this time when I was not needing it, or seeking it. Just trying to show me She could do it at will, without my help.

I have tried many times in the years since then to open myself to that kind of experience again, but it has not happened. Maybe I just haven’t found the right thin places. But somehow I think that it was the spiritual discipline of a place and community like Caldey Abbey that put me in the right frame to be open to those experiences, and that without that discipline I cannot be so radically open to God. I’m just guessing. I only know that it doesn’t happen these days, or at least, hasn’t.

Loughcrew

I need to tell you about one more holy place. As I was making my way westward across Ireland near the end of my sabbatical time I stayed a couple of days at a B&B outside of Navan, northwest of Dublin. The operator was very friendly (as I found most Irish). She was curious what I was about, and after five weeks in a Cisterian monastery I’d talk to anybody about anything they’d listen to, so I told her, in some detail. (She had a curious practice of punctuating sentences with a sudden, sharp intake of air, almost a gasp. At first I thought she was surprised or shocked by something I’d said, or by something she’d seen over my shoulder. Eventually I realized it was just her habit of punctuation.) She was quite interested and said she might be able to help. It just happened (gasp) that she had been entrusted with the key to one of the locked chamber tombs at Loughcrew and I really should visit there. I looked it up on the map and it was doable, so I added it to the agenda. I drove out there next day, arriving at late morning, entrusted key in pocket and unprepared for what I found. Loughcrew is a cluster of chamber tombs very like the renowned Newgrange, only much, much smaller. There must have been a dozen or more of them, each one surrounded by its own cluster of five to a dozen small chamber tombs. Every hilltop as far as I could see with my binoculars seemed to be home to a chamber tomb with its cluster of smaller ones. When I found the one for which I had the key it was already populated with a busload of school kids. I bided my time, checking out other tombs, hoping they would leave before another bus arrived. They did. And no one else had come yet! I had that site to myself. This particular tomb was the largest in this complex, and its central burial chamber had not yet been completely studied by the archeologists, so was kept locked to protect it behind a barred door such that you could see in, but could not get in. But! I had the key! Furtive glances around, no one in sight. Unlock door, creep in, lock door behind me, sneak down the passageway, right into the central burial chamber. No bones or anything, a few candles; some others have been here before with motives as subversive as mine. Some modest but ancient spirals and cupped circles on the stones, nothing spectacular, but certainly authentic. Probably three to five thousand years old. I settled down to experience this space. Here I was alone, in an ancient burial site which certainly had been used, sitting in the very place where the body, probably many bodies had been interred sequentially. Considered a holy place by the pagans who’d made it. Maybe a portal to the spiritual world? I settled in to stay a while, not particularly in prayer; just being there, listening, feeling, sensing, wondering. One family came and explored and left without detecting me. Alone again. Very quiet. There was enough light from the entrance and a hole in the center of the otherwise intact roof to keep it from feeling spooky. Did it feel holy? Sacred? I could not be sure whether the very vague sense I had was of this place, or merely my feeling of oddness for being in it. I came away unsure. But it was certainly a unique experience. I thanked my hostess for her generosity. I knew not what to make of it. I still don’t.

Standing Stone Circles

In Chapter 2 I talk a little about a circle of stones named Gors Fawr. It was not my first circle of stones, but it was my introduction. Nancy and I have sought out a number of circles over the years, even made that search one of the foci of a vacation in Scotland after the end of my sabbatical. I will not offer a discourse on them; you can search that out for yourself. I only need to say that they may be very important. Perhaps holy sites. Not Christian, but holy nonetheless. We do not, after all, have a monopoly on holiness.

My first circle had been the most famous, Stone Henge. Suzy and I encountered it on my first trip to the British Isles the year before she died. Unfortunately we got there only a day or two before the summer solstice, and the surrounding grounds were a solid encampment of self-proclaimed druids and new-agers, and people pretending to be white witches and such. There was nothing holy about that site on that day. Someone (in deep reverence I would suppose) had spray-painted some graffiti on the stones, so they were now well fenced off and unapproachable. A tourist attraction to pass by as quickly as possible.

I may have encountered another circle of stones before Gors Fawr, I can’t recall. I do remember a few standing stones (not circles), while on Celtic pilgrimages that seemed to have some unnameable, faint power about them; or maybe it was my imagination. Or my hope. My next circle after Stone Henge was likely the Ring of Brodgar on Mainland in the Orkneys, a circle three hundred and forty feet in diameter with stones that stand as high as fifteen feet. Nancy and I were introduced to it during a small local tour, and then returned to walk among the stones and experience them for ourselves. I don’t remember experiencing anything of power among them, though they are very impressive.

Clearest in my mind are several circles Nancy and I sought out the summer of 1996, at the conclusion of my sabbatical, these on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The first, Ceann Hulavig was off the beaten track, lost in a field you could only get to by walking blindly over a hilltop. We had to get directions from two farmers chatting at a gate; they looked at us and at each other in barely disguised amusement. It was not a huge circle (actually an ellipse forty-three by thirty-one feet) with only five stones still standing, though the stones ranged up to eight and a half feet tall. We spent a while there, in amongst the stones, comparing what we were experiencing, sensing something but with such a vague intensity that we were not the least sure it wasn’t simply our imagination, or wishful thinking. Then two younger folks came over the hilltop from a different direction. They were carrying dowsing rods and dowsing every now and then. When they got close to the circle they started dowsing seriously. We watched a while, doing our own exploring. After they’d covered the area I asked, “Finding anything?” “Yes,” was the reply, “the intersection of two ley lines. (One theory of the placement of standing stone circles is that they mark the intersection of ley lines, lines of power that run along the earth’s surface). Actually, several ley lines.” I sensed something from one of the stones.

We went on to the “The Men of Callanish,” a most impressive circle (again, an ellipse forty-three by thirty-nine feet with a central pillar, thirteen stones, and an avenue of nineteen stones), considered second only to Stone Henge. Called “The Men of Callanish” because the swirls in the graining of the Lewissean gneiss (the oldest stone in the world) create in some of the stones the impression of faces. The stones, while much smaller than Stone Henge, are much more beautiful, and the site is more inspiring, overlooking Loch Roags. But by now it has become the major tourist attraction of Lewis, with a tourist center and all, and signs directing people to stay on the paths outside the circle itself. Too busy to emit any holiness or power for an average observer such as myself.

But only three-quarters of a mile away we found Cnoc Fillibhir within full view of Callanish. Within sight of the highway, it is bypassed by folks headed for Callanish, and so is left alone. We spent over an hour there and no one else came! Two concentric ellipses (the outer forty-five by forty-three feet with thirteen stones, five of them fallen, and the inner thirty-four by twenty-one feet of now only four stones, but taller than the outer ring) made of the same stone as Callanish, so with the same beautiful graining. We had the time and aloneness to explore this circle and felt with some certainty some power emanating from at least one of the stones. Three hundred yards down the hill toward the loch was still another circle, Cnoc Cneann.

I confess that I do not know what to make of these circles of standing stones. I am somewhat repulsed by their attraction for new-agers and self-styled druids. But on the other hand, something about them draws me too, and what my guide in Wales said makes some peace in me about them. I suppose their age, and some unexamined supposition in me that the ancients who sited and built them were working from some ancient wisdom now lost to us, piques my curiosity. Probably pure fantasy, wishful thinking. But the mystery of them is still one of my foundation stones. I cannot bring myself to dig it up and roll it off the slope. I am stuck with it.

The Smell of Dirt

I remember from my tender years the smell of the dirt in the woods, on a hot August day when the temperature was almost unbearable up at the top, but down here, in the quiet, stillness of the shadowed woods it was dimmer and cooler and dank, and as I sat beside that tiny creek, watching the water trickle by, hoping to see a crawdad, the sweet, smell of the cool damp earth was luscious! I did not recognize it then, but God was there, watching me, comforting me in the hollow of Her hand.

The Voice of God

The prophets heard God speaking (“The LORD said . . . ”). Some preachers of the evangelical bent claim to hear God speaking. I am a doubter. Only liars and crazy men claim they hear God speaking to them audibly. There are far too many Elmer Gantrys in this world for me to trust any of them. But I have heard the voice of God, once. I was in chapel, in seminary, in that rough middler year when everything theological I’d brought to seminary was being ripped out of me and new understandings put into their places. The pain was intense. I had only one question, “Did I belong here? Was I intended for ministry in the church?” And the answer coming out of my pain was, “No, bail out now.” But I had a wife and two small children, no occupation, no way to make a living, not the slightest notion what else in life I might want to do, or be able to do. Suzy pointed out that I didn’t even have a suit to wear to a job interview. And so I was praying furiously, Tell me, God, do I belong here? Do you want me now? God, give me some sign. But the more furiously I prayed, the deeper the silence I was hearing back. There was no answer for me. So I prayed even more furiously. Until finally one evening in chapel as I knelt and intensely prayed I heard a voice behind me, to my right, two pews back, “Be quiet and do your studies.” Or I think it might have said, “Shut up, and do your studies.” I looked back. The voice had been loud and clear and firm. But there was no one in that pew. There was no one even near that pew. The voice was not one I recognized. Not a student. Not a faculty member. I had clearly heard it. But no one else in the chapel looked like he had heard it. And it was not the answer I’d wanted. I went home from chapel befuddled. What had I heard? Had I hallucinated? Had I needed an answer so desperately that I’d unconsciously manufactured one? But if I had, this was not an answer I would have wanted. I did not trust people who said that God talked to them, they were crazy, hallucinating. But I had heard it. It took several days to accept that I had in fact heard it. That the answer had been directed at me. That, even though it was not an answer I’d wanted, my prayer had been answered. But it had not taken away the pain, had not relieved the anguish, had not stopped the tearing out of everything that had brought me here. The answer was there, clear as a bell; but so was the pain.

That event got me through a few more weeks, but the pain was still winning. I needed to get the hell out. I needed to leave, to quit. Suzy (my first wife, long dead of cancer) reasoned, pleaded, cried, and finally suggested one thing I could grab hold of, “Go talk to Al Dalton first.” Al had been my chaplain that summer in the Clinical Pastoral Training program, he had opened doors for me, and I had come to trust him. So I drove that night in complete desperation to talk to Al. He sat me down and he listened, long into the night, and quietly, gently suggested to me the same thing that voice had, do my studies. That was a course financially feasible, it was not fatally final, and if when I completed the course, I could still choose not to go on. Al was considerably gentler and kinder to me than that voice had been, and he suggested to me just about the same thing that it had. But he had taken the time to help me understand the wisdom of that option. I went back to Bexley and finished the course. I consented to ordination and ministered for many years, not without rough places, but to the end, with no regrets.

I’ve never heard that voice again. Nor have I ever sought it that furiously. I have no doubt that it was God I heard. But I did learn from that event to listen for God in other ways, in the sound of others’s voices. And I’ve heard His answers many times. But never again in that voice. At least, not yet.

Karl Barth

I remember hearing about an interview of Karl Barth, the premier conservative theologian of the last century. He was asked to summarize what he believed as simply as possible. After a long pause he quoted the children’s song, “Jesus loves me, this I know. . . .” The interviewer asked back, but why would you believe that? And Barth answered, “My mother told me.” I guess for me that’s getting down to the bedrock fundamentals. We believe because sometime in our history someone whom we trusted implicitly said, “Believe this.” It may be as simple as that.

My Relationship with Jee-zuz

In retrospect I realize that, despite having given myself to Christ at that summer youth conference, I have nowhere identified as one of my foundation stones a close, personal relationship with the Christ (or JEE-zuz, as some would prefer). That is an important curiosity for me. There is, has always been, so much talk in the church of one’s relationship with Christ, of the warmth and strength and power of that relationship. It clearly is the cornerstone of faith for very many Christians, if not most. In some corners it is promulgated as the only sure foundation of a true Christian faith. But just as clearly it is not for me! William James has observed that some can pray while others cannot; and I have similarly concluded that is true of the Christward relationship as well; it is for some people and for others it is not.

I remember one summer afternoon when I arrived at the Cincinnati airport for an impromptu interview arranged by a seminary classmate with his bishop. I was out of work and desperate for a parish. I should have been willing to say anything needed to get the job. The interview progressed quickly to the fateful question, “Tell me about your relationship with Christ.” As I heard the words come out of my mouth I knew there was no job for me with this bishop. To my detriment I told him the truth, that I really felt no strong relationship with Christ, that my relationship was primarily with the godhead. I supposed aloud that as I had no brothers, only sisters, a brotherly relationship with Christ was less natural to me than one with God the Father himself, that it was He to whom I regularly prayed. The interview proceeded, but there was no fire left in it, and I heard no more from that bishop. Obviously my lack of a close, intimate relationship with Christ was a liability, not an asset.

I have aggressively sought a Christward relationship at several points in my life, but Christ seems never to have chosen to befriend me (or perhaps God knows that would not be appropriate for Jack Bowers). I remember kneeling at the altar rail at St. John’s in Cambridge and fervently praying for, pleading for that relationship. The small parish was in trouble, slowly dwindling in the heart of a slowly declining small city. I was flailing about, grasping for any tool that would lift us out of our survival mode and make us strong. We had a small prayer group meeting weekly to sing and share and offer intercessory prayers together (a “Prayer and Praise” group). A few of that circle were zealous advocates of the charismatic route, and a few others, while not so zealous, were passively compliant and willing. And I was silently asking myself whether I could, if it were beneficial to the parish, go that route. So after going with them to a charismatic workshop at the Mecca of charismania in Ohio led by the national star Chuck Irish himself (in whose voice I still could hear the same anger-fulled cynicism I’d heard when I taught him Greek in seminary) and after wrestling with myself about that charismatic possibility, I concluded that while it ran counter to my fiber, I could. So I knelt at the altar rail several days in a row and prayed, pled, really. I asked for Jee-zuz to come into my life (in the newly devised tradition of charismania the pronunciation “Jee-zuz” seems to be preferred, along with the very frequent use of “ . . . I jess wanna . . . ” in every spontaneous prayer). With some reluctance and trepidation I even prayed for the gift of speaking in tongues (i.e., glossilalia), which is (in that tradition) the absolutely surest proof that one has received Christ into his/her life. I may have prayed nearly as furiously as I had that middler year in seminary, but this time no voice. No consoling warmth of “the Baptism in the Spirit.” And no tumbling words of an unknown tongue (I tried, and only a few poorly contrived scraps of oral garbage came out.) I had to conclude that this salvific solution was not for the people of St. John’s or for me.

But throughout most of my life I have been content relating only to the one God. The Trinity, described as an unsolvable mystery, has always been a problem for me. I have preached it, have proclaimed it; but I have always stumbled some over it. I am too damned logical; the math of the Trinity just doesn’t work for me. And that, coupled with my non-relationship with the Christ, (and at seminary I was accustomed to refer to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, as “the Blue Blur,” which was as close as I could come to defining it), has urged me to see this lack as an important foundation stone, perhaps, to follow my metaphor, a limen through which an alternative understanding (or better yet “opportunity”) might enter, or be sought. It may be, in some odd, inverse kind of way, that this lack of an intimate relationship with Christ is one of my most important foundation stones, perhaps the cornerstone.

John O’Donohue

Sr. Cintra Pemberton’s pilgrimages were life-giving during a decade of spiritual famine in my life. She was a monastic, of the Episcopal Order of St. Helena, who made a ministry and a specialty of putting together and leading pilgrimages in Celtic areas, and she was exceedingly good at it. She understood the need to see something ancient and holy but new to us, and also to have time and space to stop and reflect, to ponder what that ancient, new holiness is pointing toward in one’s life. This was her way of helping fund her order, but also do a very specialized ministry. I have gone with her to Wales, both north and south, to west Scotland and to Orkney, and finally to west Ireland. It was on that last one that I met John O’Donohue. We were in Connemara, and someone who was scheduled to lecture the pilgrim group on Celtic spirituality had to cancel at the last minute and Cintra quickly arranged a backup. But he had to cancel as well, and recommended O’Donohue, whom Cintra knew not a whit about. He arrived, a few minutes late, fairly breathless, had been caught up in a pre-marital counseling session, and sat down to talk to us.

O’Donohue was a priest in the Roman Church (or at least was then; he was on the outs with his bishop as well as others, and eventually did not finish in orders), a native of Connemara, a poet, philosopher (his doctorate was about the mystic Meister Eckhart), theologian, teacher, and Celt. As he began to talk to our pilgrim group I shortly realized that he was not so much talking about Celtic spirituality as being it. I soon realized that there was little linearity to his lecture, he seemed to be talking in circles and ellipses and spirals. He was obviously well educated and grounded, but his thinking, or at least his lecture, was much more associative than linear. To some he seemed to be rambling. But my sense was that instead of lecturing us about Celtic spirituality he was simply immersing us, dipping us in it. I was completely fascinated and utterly captivated.

I came away determined to lay hand on his only publication at that time, a set of six audio tapes entitled Anamchara (Gaelic for “soul-friend”). They have since been transposed into written form and published as a book, but much was lost in that process. The words are the same, but the melody and lilt of his voice is probably as important as the words themselves. I recommend the tapes in preference. From a vast knowledge of western philosophers and Christian mystics he simply talks on the tapes, wandering from topic to topic, never exhausting one before he moves on, but frequently returning to revisit topics, moving in a circular or spiral pattern, all about the spiritual life. That is obviously his first love, teaching about the spiritual life. He does it well. And he takes me places, points out to me things that no one else has ever mentioned to me. He introduced me to the interior life, and to my soul which lives at the back of the interior landscape behind my eyes. And he invited me to spend some of myself exploring that interior landscape and getting acquainted with my soul.

Over my years I have gradually come to conclude that there are basically two poles to the spiritual life. The external thrust is to spend oneself delivering God’s love (that is, mercy AND justice) to the world, to those around me. Feeding the poor, lobbying on behalf of the oppressed, being God’s active agent in the world. This is the social action effort of the church and of Christian people, really of all godly people. The other pole, the inward thrust is the exploration of the interior landscape, the befriending of one’s own soul, becoming close to the God who is the ground of our being and who is found through the soul. I learned some about that during my stay with the Cistercians; they did not teach me directly, I simply observed them, and heard squibs about their doing of it. Brother Gildas was taught his “cell would teach him everything he needed to know.” It took me a while to get myself around that idea. But when I heard O’Donohue talking about the interior landscape, and getting acquainted with one’s soul, I think I began to understand how the solitude and silence of the monk’s cell would teach one everything he needed to know.

My ministries have always been focused on institutional issues, social system dynamics and such; and I have pushed gently toward social action, perhaps too gently. And I have ever so gradually tried to offer more and more around the inward journey, about the spiritual life, about the feeding of the soul. But I have been struck that very few are interested in that kind of stuff. Maybe it is food for only a few. Maybe the inward journey, like psychoanalysis, is only for a very few. Maybe the population of monasteries is about at the right level for the total population of our era. But as I age, I am more and more inclined to think that is what it’s really all about. That spiritual stuff is the real cornerstone. Both poles must be there for a healthy spirituality; but all the social action in the world is worthless to the doer without at least a bit of the inward thrust. Some of us are better at one than the other; but we all need some of both.

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There are probably some other foundation stones which I have not yet thought to describe, or which may be so deeply buried that I am not even aware of them. If you poke and prod a bit in me we may together discover some more of them. This spiritual structure of mine is definitely a work in progress. But I suspect that these are the more important of those stones.

1. Lectio Divina (translate “Divine Reading”) is a traditional Benedictine practice of scriptural reading, meditation and prayer intended to promote communion with God and to increase the knowledge of God’s Word. It does not treat Scripture as texts to be studied, but as the Living Word. Lectio Divina has four separate steps: read; meditate; pray; contemplate.