Learning to Stay Put

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard the question. A guest, visiting the Monastery for the first time sits next to me at supper. She asks my name, then how long I’ve been a monk. Then it comes: “How did you get to the Monastery?” I have to bite back my cheeky side to stop myself from saying, “I took the Metro-North from Spuyten Duyvil, changed at Croton-Harmon for Poughkeepsie, and then took a cab.” I know she doesn’t mean how I literally came to the Monastery from my apartment in Inwood for my first visit ten or so years ago. Nor has this particular guest asked me this question 100 times, though it may be the 100th time I’ve heard it this month.

If I want to keep the conversation at the superficial level appropriate to most supper tables, then I usually say something along the lines of “I loved it so much here that I didn’t want to leave. One time, I didn’t.” If I’ve met this guest before, or if I’m feeling more earnest that evening, I’ll say, “I felt like this was a place I could become myself, and that’s just what’s happened.” If I really want to move deep, though—and every so often I do—I tell the deeper truth. I say that I don’t really remember why I came to the Monastery. The more interesting question, at least to me now, is why I stay.

The answer to that question, to the one that no guest has ever asked me, changes from day to day and season to season. One morning when I was a novice, the then Superior walked into the common room while I and another novice were chatting. My fellow novice asked the Superior, apropos of nothing, why he’d stayed in the Order all these years. The Superior didn’t answer right then. Two days later he found the two of us and said, “I stay because I said I would.” That answer struck me then as profound and simple and very, very difficult to live by. It still does.

When we focus on God’s call to us, it’s so easy to get caught up in the drama of revelatory moments when suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, we know who and whose we are. Some stranger walking by the roadside calls out to us, and immediately we know that we must leave everything behind and follow. But these moments don’t arise in a vacuum. As clear as the dawning light may be, it was the night beforehand, peppered with stars of smaller and more elemental revelations that often pave the way for whatever grand epiphanies we may experience.

While many of us have those moments of radiant revelation, even they fade in the dailiness and, yes, the tedium of making a life with God. We can thank God that they do.

Christian Wiman captures this experience when he writes that “What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will become so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it.” (1)

Falling in love is a moment of insanity, or so my novice master told us. It’s a necessary step in moving more deeply into relationship with God or with another person or the world, but it doesn’t last. The blinding revelation is important. It may give us the energy or motivation we need to say yes to life or no to death, or simply to get ourselves out the door and onto the road we know has been calling us. But it is not the end—it is merely the beginning.

Like the culture that surrounds us, we Christians, too, can become obsessed with the feeling of falling in love. While we may dress up this fixation with language of vocation and discernment, we sometimes fall into habits of constant vigilance in the search for what God is calling me to now. That’s not to say that God is not always at work within and around us, always bringing life from death in novel ways. But it is to say that at a certain point we have discerned our vocation. Full stop. And rather than continuing to discern, we need to get on with the often dull and unsexy work of living out that vocation.

A life with God is, I’m sorry to tell you, rather an ordinary one, taken step by step, day by day, moment by moment. The revelations fade into the background. The burning ardor of those first moments of the relationship cool. One day we finally have to confront the fact that God is not who we thought God was. Perhaps neither are we. Our choices and our best efforts have not saved us or made us good or holy or free. We are not perfect or perfectly consummated beings yet, and we may never be.

As Wiman points out, the moment when we realize and then come to accept that there is no right way that will become apparent to us once and for all, there is no calling that will soothe every hurt in our life, there is no spiritual practice or vocation or relationship that will eradicate the humanness of it all—that moment is the real beginning. It’s not exciting enough to make the cover of Discernment Weekly. But it is this very ordinary and very human dailiness with God that makes a life.

When I look back at the moments of contact with God that have sustained and formed me, they are mostly quiet, hidden, embodied, and sweet. I remember the Good Friday liturgy when I was seven or eight. After venerating the Cross, I returned to my seat. Kneeling there, I closed my eyes, breathing hard, blood flushing my warm skin. I was aware, even then, that something fundamental about the world had changed. An intuition of the unity of pain and beauty, death and salvation had wedged its way into my heart like the nail in Jesus’ feet. It was as if some great force of love, something so much bigger than I and at the same time so much closer than I could imagine, was gazing on me, saw me fully. I wanted to relax into that presence. I also wanted to flee. My body knew so many years before my mind caught up that God had got hold of me and wasn’t going to let me go.

That moment is the first time I remember feeling the curious mixture of fear and desire that I have come to recognize as my body’s sign of proximity to the holy. It is, for me, one of the ways the knowledge of its origin soaks into my consciousness. When the dailiness of it all does work itself into my heart like a thorn, it is the feel of the wood on my lips, or the warmth of my friend Tom’s eyes, or the gentle breeze through the meadow outside our Monastery that steady my faltering step and remind me that, yes, I chose my life, even as God chose me, and yes, I choose to keep choosing it. That yes, it’s easy to fall in and out of the insanity of love again and again and hard to stay put in the boredom and the seeming sameness of it all, and that, yes, God is still here and so I choose to still be here too.

I trust that in God’s time and in God’s way, I will become the person God has made me to be. Because, whatever else, God is good, and that is everything. In the meantime, I’ll stay put. Sometimes because it’s beautiful and lovely in this place, and sometimes only because I said I would. It doesn’t matter what the reason is today. I choose to stay.