"The Gardener"
Have I lived enough?
Have I loved enough?
Have I considered Right Action enough, have I come to any conclusion?
Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?
Have I endured loneliness with grace?
I say this, or perhaps I'm just thinking it.
Actually, I probably think too much.
Then I step out into the garden,
where the gardener, who is said to be a simple man,
is tending his children, the roses.
I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. It's said that in such a place certain revelations may be discovered. That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I'm not talking about a vacation.
Of course at the same time I mean to stay exactly where I am.
Are you following me?
Holy Week Wednesday
"I Happened to be Standing"
I don't know where prayers go.
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opossum pray as it
crosses the street? The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can't really
call being alive.
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that's their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.
While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way i begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don't know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn't persuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don't. That's your business.
But I thought, of the wren's singing, what could this be
if it isn't a prayer?
So I just listened, my pen in the air.
Prayers/Poems from Mary Oliver for Holy Week
Holy Week Tuesday
"The poet compares human nature to the ocean from which we came"
The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth,
it can lie down like silk breathing
or toss havoc shoreward; it can give
gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth
like an incoming frenzy of fountain, or it can
sweet-talk entirely. As I can, too.
and so, no doubt, can you, and you.
Prayers/Poems from Mary Oliver for Holy Week
Holy Week Monday
"On Traveling to Beautiful Places"
Every day I'm still looking for God
and I'm still finding him everywhere,
in the dust, in the flowerbeds.
Certainly in the oceans,
in the islands that lay in the distance
continents of ice, countries of sand
each with its own set of creatures
and God, by whatever name.
How perfect to be aboard a ship with
maybe a hundred years still in my pocket.
But it's late, for all of us,
and in truth the only ship there is
is the ship we are all on
burning the world as we go.
Prayers/Poems from Mary Oliver for Holy Week:
Palm Sunday
"Today"
Today I'm flying low and I'm
not saying a word.
I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.
The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.
But I'm taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I'm traveling
a terrific distance.
Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.
This weekend we lost our five newest members to attendance at workshops. Two stayed rather close, traveling 85 miles or so south to Villa Maria Conference Center. A Western PA inter-formation group has been sponsoring national speakers there for many years. Men and women in formation in communities from Pittsburgh up to Erie are invited. I first heard John Allen and Ilia Delio there and they were great. This weekend it was a speaker on race and racism in the USA.
The other three traveled considerably farther to central Indiana and a Benedictine conference for all members of the four federations under age 55, the group is appropriately named "55 and Under."
So we lost their presence, their voices and their energy but we gained the same from the guests that joined us for the Lenten vigil Saturday night, this morning for Sunday's liturgy and even some who are staying in the guest hall and hermitages.
And what else did we gain? The daffodils and tulips may still on the verge of popping out, ditto the forsythia, but these "friends" are coming around more and more. Here are three that were grazing and romping on the east side of the Mount this afternoon. Welcome back!
.JPG)
