Stopping For A Few Days Just “To Be”
My first out-of-town, post-vaccination outing wasn’t to the beach or a family reunion or a graduation ceremony or some vacation spot. It was to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.
In a way, it was like a homecoming. As soon as I stepped out of the car and felt the palpable silence that surrounds Gethsemani, got a whiff of the blooming lilacs and cast my eyes across the cypress and sycamore trees, an even deeper green than usual after a morning rain, I remembered why I go to monasteries, why we all need monasteries. Monasteries — among many things — are places that remind us we don’t have to constantly be doing. It’s possible to simply be.
That is a lesson we can’t learn too often. Although the abbey still is closed to overnight guests, visitors can meet with monks on the grounds. I went to spend some time with my friend and co-author, Brother Paul Quenon, as engaging and entertaining a companion as anyone could wish for.
Of course, workaholic that I am, I came with a goal to accomplish. I needed to complete a series of video conversations with Brother Paul about our new book together, “How to Be: A Monk & A Journalist Reflect on Living & Dying, Purpose & Prayer, Forgiveness & Friendship,” based on our letters to each other over the years.
Luckily, Brother Paul is a master of the art of pausing, something, sadly, I still preach better than I practice. He made certain we also had ample time for what monks call “holy leisure.”
The first night, Brother Paul organized a picnic at the hermitage in the woods where Thomas Merton lived from 1965 to 1968, the final three years of his life. The cinderblock cabin is much as Merton knew it, though an indoor toilet, running water and electricity have been added since Merton first moved in.
Brother Paul talked about how he usually takes a week-long retreat at the hermitage every year, bringing along a pile of books. He rarely gets to his reading. Instead, he spends hours on the porch, sitting on a chair marked “Seat of Dreams,” listening to the pileated woodpeckers and bullfrogs and watching mist float over the green hills Kentuckians call knobs. It’s a sacred time.
On that first night, Brother Paul read excerpts on the hermitage porch from a journal he’s been keeping of his ersatz thoughts and goings-on at the monastery. On the second night, he invited along Father Lawrence Morey, the abbey’s novice director and official videographer (who had graciously filmed the conversations for our book), and novelist and essayist Fenton Johnson, who grew up in the nearby town of New Haven. Fenton was just back from traveling through the West, researching a piece for The New Yorker.
After our picnic supper, Brother Paul asked me to read some of the poems I’ve written since resolving last January to return to the writing of poetry. I couldn’t have asked for a more appreciative audience, though it was intimidating to think Merton, whose collected poems fill a thousand-plus- page volume, might be listening.
Brother Paul seems to have an interior clock that alerts him to when it’s time to stop work — or play — and go pray. He always brought our our proceedings to a close just moments before the bells rang, calling the monks to community prayer. It occurred to me that monks, and all who live a monastic vocation, learn early on to practice pausing because they stop in the middle of whatever they are doing several times a day to pray with their monastic community.
For the Trappists, it means pausing seven times daily –eight if you count Mass — beginning at 3:15 in the morning. Eight sacred pauses.
During my visit, a crew arrived from Notre Dame University to tape a podcast with Brother Paul about his 2018 memoir, “In Praise of the Useless Life.” The interviewer told Brother Paul of a friend who had quit a job on Wall Street after realizing he had virtually no life outside of his work.
Brother Paul calls this “the tyranny of perfectionism,” and it’s something that drives so many of us. He remembered the day he arrived to join the monastery, and as he walked through Gethsemani’s gatehouse, he spotted an elderly monk walking by. ”There was something in the presence of that humble brother,” he recalled. “It was the presence of the sacred.”
Brother Paul said something else in the course of our visit that has stayed with me: “I don’t think that God expects as much of us as we expect of ourselves.”
It made me think, so what if I don’t ever write a best-selling book? Would that be worth more than one minute of time I’ve spent sitting with a friend who needed me to listen?
And here is another gem from Brother Paul: Don’t just spend time with the people you love. Waste time with them.
When I returned home, a card was waiting from my friend University of Idaho Professor Michael Kroth, who writes the excellent “Profound Living” blog. He sent a haiku he wrote:
What’s my life purpose?
Today watching drifting clouds.
Tomorrow, the same.
It was as though Michael was channeling Brother Paul!
On the final afternoon of our visit, Brother Paul invited me to take off my shoes, though it was raining, and dance with him on the wet grass. And so we danced barefoot to music in our heads and occasionally to a melodic line Brother Paul would hum from Bruckner’s 9th Symphony, one of his favorites.
Lest you think this is a crazy monk thing, a study published in the Journal of Environment and Public Health earlier this year found that walking barefoot on grass can help prevent insomnia; reduce inflammation; improve eyesight and heart health, and add to an overall sense of mental well-being.
This week, can we have the courage to waste some time? Can we dispense with the “tyranny of perfectionism?” Can we take a few moments to go outside, find a patch of grass, and barefoot, just dance, dance?
