St. Bernard Abbey Church
Cullman, Alabama
The
world is my cloister.
Yours
too.
It’s
a too obvious pun, but often the art of writing for the spirit is stating the
obvious. “The world is my oyster” is an idiom or metaphor for personal success.
“The world is my cloister” is an invitation to experience the world and success
in a different way.
And,
given that beings like ourselves are multiple light years away, if at all, earth
is our own little cloister in the known universe.
That’s
what came to me Monday morning, the day I write this. Before I continued my
re-reading of The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris (which clearly gave
me the idea), I sat on our front porch for some time sipping my coffee,
listening and observing.
The
street is quieter now that we are sheltering in place because of COVID-19.
Fewer of us going to work and no children being driven or biking or walking to
school means diminished traffic. The only people I see are walking their dogs
or walking and running themselves. Most of the sounds I hear are squirrels chasing
one another in the trees and birds chirping or bickering.
An
almost invisible flash of light overhead sends a slow and lengthy rumbling of
thunder through the clouds above. A light, almost imperceptible rain begins to
fall, and in places where the moisture silently gathers until released—leaves,
roofs, gutters—I can better hear the periodic splatter of its deliverance to
concrete, asphalt, or puddle.
These
gentle sounds are occasionally and briefly overrun—nearby or from afar—by the
roaring and screeching and banging of the city’s metal dragons devouring our
rubbish and our recyclables—Monday is trash day in our neighborhood, after all.
I
revisit a very pleasant dream I had Sunday morning as I awoke. I was home with
my biological family in our tract house in the L.A. suburbs, enjoying a happy
visit. We were all about to leave to go other places and were explaining to one
another what we had planned. I felt a hand on the top of my head, gentle but
firm, as if in blessing. I didn’t know if it was Mom’s or Dad’s or, wishful
thinking—could it be God’s? I fully woke up, still feeling this hand pressed on
my head and thought I’d find my hand there or Wade’s, but lo, there was no hand.
I told Wade about it on our morning walk.
Now,
on Monday, a familiar neighbor walks by with his big friendly dogs, and I pick
up an umbrella to walk toward him while keeping our respectful six feet of
social distance. We speak of our shared experience of Ormewood Church on Zoom
yesterday, a digital app that allowed our spiritual community’s first meeting
since the governor of Georgia banned gatherings to constrain spread of the
virus.
I
had been surprised that so many—35 family units—signed on for the service, with
liturgists, singers, and pastor leading us remotely. Wade and I had kept our setting on “gallery”
so we could see the families attending in their varied home environments.
I
confessed to the neighbor that, because we didn’t focus exclusively on our
pastor during Jenelle’s sermon, I untypically did not follow the sermon so
well—my fault, not hers—as I enjoyed the distractions of kids climbing on
parents or fiddling with the devices or sticking faces or fingers in their camera's eye.
What
our neighbor took away from the experience, he said, was that “this is
community” –that so many went to the trouble to log in and participate,
including our usual small group time in which we were asked, “What has been
your ‘darkest valley’ this week and what has been your ‘grassy meadow’?” Our
text for the service and the sermon was Psalm 23.
I
was especially in awe that Zoom could scramble us into small groups after the
sermon where we could see one another on our screens and offer our answers to
one another by unmuting our speakers.
We
are blessed by these new cathedrals. And we are blessed when we see and hear,
taste and sense our neighbors and neighborhoods as cloisters of the Spirit, of
the holy, of the whole people of God. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow
us all the days of our lives, and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord our
whole lives long.”
Related
post:
A Healing Touch
I
was invited to be among the contributors to Ashes to Rainbows: A Queer
Lenten Devotional that includes meditations for Ash Wednesday, the Sundays
of Lent, and the days of Holy Week. Go to: https://justiceunbound.org/queerlent/
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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser.
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