Backwards Monastic
by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
Each of us lives in the hermitage of our daily self. —Thomas Merton
When I was in seventh grade, my family drove up from New York to Vermont over winter break to cross-country ski. On a lark, we visited Weston Abbey, the Benedictine monastery—a peculiar stop for our liberal, suburban, United Methodist family for whom faith meant getting to church without wet hair on Sunday morning.
Shockingly, the monks wore robes. I’d never seen such a thing. To my junior high mind, this fashion choice signaled immense holiness. We crowded onto benches with a few dozen worshipers in their small, plain chapel. The monks sang homemade songs to a strummed guitar. They walked slowly. They smiled a lot. Here was a species of human I’d never before encountered—one so fearlessly dedicated to God, they harbored Nicaraguan refugees and wore robes!—and with sudden, abiding fierceness I wanted this for myself; I wanted to throw off the world and immerse myself in prayer; I wanted with pre-teen passion to dedicate my life to what matters most. In the gift shop I spent my babysitting money on a necklace, a silver dove charm hanging from a black cord. A monk had designed and cast it, infusing it (I imagined) with prayer. I wore it under my clothes. Through junior and senior high I’d be miserably jogging around the track in gym or enduring algebra, and the dove was there, cool against my skin, a secret promise that someday I would leave all this for the better part.
Instead I have a wife, a child, a handful of jobs, a mortgage, an aging father in another state. I’m in school part-time. Daily I pack peanut butter and jelly lunches, clean the kitty litter and the email box and my daughter’s hair; I prepare lessons; I weed the garden. When retreat newsletters arrive in my inbox announcing their weeks of centering prayer, their introductions to the spirituality of Teilhard de Chardin or Teresa of Avila, their deep and protracted silence, I’m once again twelve, my longing a tangle of pure holy desire and immature escapism. Over and over I say no—no to the Snowmass retreat with Father Thomas Keating’s protégé because my daughter needs me and I’m already gone a lot for work and to be with my father; no to the day-long exploration of cosmic evolution because the windows need glazing before winter; no to the public reading of sacred poetry; no, even, to the second daily sit my prayer life desperately needs. I even say no to the PTA meetings I want to attend, no to evenings playing my favorite songs on the piano, no to most of the calls for activism I’d very much like to heed. Instead I listen to Gwyn read her homework. She sounds out each word. Her knees press against mine. I have chosen this: motherhood, marriage, an ordinary home.
Except for twenty minutes each day, when I don the soft brown robes of humility and kneel in prayer. Thought after thought sneaks into my awareness. I apprehend each thought, using apprehension as a chance to practice release. The part of me that wants something small—to run after a thought—surrenders to the part of me that wants something big: the presence and movement of love. My partial self bows to complete Self. For twenty minutes, I practice consent.
Then through the rest of my frantic day this practice continues, although I see it only fleetingly. I release my desire to chase after spiritual experiences. I release my longing for faith community. I release even my beloved prayer practice when Gwyn thumps down the stairs too early, heat from her sleep still warming her pajamas, and climbs into my lap. I surrender my love for the divine in favor of bare, human love. I’m a backwards monastic, giving up the sacred for the secular but nonetheless remaining faithful to that old desire. Even the dove hiding between my breasts I release and wear openly, where it presses against those I love.
Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is the author of the novel Hannah, Delivered, the spiritual memoir Swinging on the Garden Gate, a collection of personal essays, On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood, and Holiness, and two books on writing: Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice, winner of the silver Nautilus Award, and Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir. You can connect with Elizabeth at www.spiritualmemoir.com and www.elizabethjarrettandrew.com.
