SLITHERING ON IN OUR SMALL, GLORIOUS LIVES
I feel at odds with myself this week, not sure why.
Have been reading Conversion: Spiritual Insights Into an Essential Encounter with God (!) by Fr. Donald Haggerty, a moral theologian and spiritual director who serves at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC. You may know him from his reflections in Magnificat, which are always great.
I talk about the book a bit (and some other things) in the video below.
What struck me earlier today was this:
“Is there something more to give to God that until now has been withheld? Something essential that calls for recognition? Something I am refusing to see? The question of a possible blindness in our soul can have a way of rising up at times in the silence of prayer without a satisfactory answer…Was a request from God missed? An invitation ignored?….”
Maybe, he says. But then again, “What he may desire at present is simply our complete surrender to his will in our current circumstances. That is enough, and yet it is also a very difficult thing. This must be a surrender that cuts deeply and irrevocably into our soul, and it is not easy. It is another form of conversion.”
It’s been interesting accepting my current circumstances here in Tucson. I like it here. It’s very beautiful, in its way: people do come to the Southwest from all over the world. But it’s a far cry from California, not to mention LA. The electric excitement, the melting-pot exuberance, the cutting-edge fashion, food, style–even though that was never my milieu, a certain amount of that is nice to be around.
Plus the natural beauty, the abundance, the variety of the things that will grow there: simply by sticking succulent cuttings in pots you can have a more or less rioutous garden. People tend to have a certain level of education, awareness, et cetera. Big city vs small city stuff that holds true across the board. But then there’s just the vastness and overwhelming beauty and openness and the magnificent California weather. The place is deep in my bones. Which doesn’t mean I was always (or really ever) happy there–is anyone ever really “happy” for any length of time?–nor that I regret moving, at all; nor that I want to go back.
Still I gave up 30 years of roots, such as they were, and now won’t live long enough to establish that kind of longevity anywhere. It’s left me in a new way with nowhere to lay my head in a sense. Trust me, people are not dying to get to know me here! I offered to give a free talk to college students at the nearby Newman Center and they were like…”Unh…right. Let us get back to you on that.” That was in January, 2023.
Then again no-one’s much interested in me, or anyone, in this world! So I don’t take it personally. Also though I can be pushy I’m just not the type to barge in and start shaking everyone’s hand. I tend to hang back. So be it.
For a while I thought I was supposed to make a concerted effort to change my basic temperament (I have made such attempts many times over the years but always snap back, like an elastic that’s been overstretched, to my original position). Now I see I am just where I’m “supposed” to be. Stripped down. No great ramen around the corner to cheer me up. No friends writing screenplays or putting on one-person shows or doing gigs. No temptation to mistake the “electric energy” around me for my identity; to believe that I am somehow inherently glittery, cutting-edge, attractively cosmopolitan; to suffer the illusion that externals in any way define me.
In fact, I’m exactly the same person and live the exact same kind of monastic life I did in LA, in slightly different surroundings. I trudge to Mass by myself, as often as I can, alone, as I have done since 1996. I pray. I take a walk. I read. I virtually never go out at night.I keep up with a wide variety of people. I accept any invitation or request I can. I travel a certain amount, almost always to visit someone, give a retreat, see a museum, and/or take in natural beauty. This week a couple of different visitors are coming through town so that will be wonderful.
I guess I do actually live fairly “simply,” though after reading a Gulag prison memoir it doesn’t seem so simple.
In any case, as Fr. Haggery says, even a love for beauty can’t come before Christ. I do feel I was called to Tucson for some reason that has not perhaps entirely been revealed and maybe never will be. We worry, we humans–have I missed an invitation, a call, a request from God? Or am I just thinking my life should be a little more glittery, a little more…remarkable? That I should be surrendering in a way that makes a little more of a splash…
To even ask the latter question makes me realize: No. Just keep slithering on in your glorious little life. Offer your prayers, works, joys and sufferings of this day. Do your 20 minutes of yoga with Kassandra. Get your list together for Trader Joe’s. Sweep up for the zillionth time the tiny mesquite leaves that get tracked through the house everytime you go outside. Work on this week’s column. Answer your emails and balance your checkbook. Say the Angelus at noon. Thank God you don’t live in a Russian prison camp.
And if you see a figure swathed in a second-hand Army-green Barbour coat with a fleece-lined hood, making its way up Third Street toward Campbell, cluthing a Rosary and mouthing the Luminous Mysteries around 4:45 tonight…that’ll be me, en route to Mass.
Inside, I’ll be singing.
