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By Root 865 0

Coles’s The Spiritual Life of Children, who said as she slipped into a final coma, “I’d like to go to that high rock.” When I read Psalm 131 with its image of the soul as “a weaned child on its mother’s breast” (v. 2), I remember the Benedictine sister retired from a university professorship on account of a delibitating illness who said, “For so many years, I was taught that I had to ‘master’ subjects. But who can ‘master’ beauty, or peace, or joy? This psalm speaks of the grace of childhood, not of being childish. One of my greatest freedoms is to see that all the pretenses and defenses I put up in the first part of my life, I can spend the rest of my life taking down. This psalm tells me that I’m a dependent person, and that it’s not demeaning.”

There is much beauty in the psalms to stir up childlike wonder: the God who made whales to play with, who calls the stars by name, who asks us to drink from the stream of delight. Though as adults we want answers, we will sometimes settle for poetry and begin to see how it is possible to say, “My soul sings psalms to God unceasingly (Ps. 30:12), even if that means, in the words of one Benedictine nun, “I pray best in the dentist’s chair.”

The height and depth of praise urged on us in the psalms (“Let everything that lives and that breathes / give praise to the Lord” [Ps. 150:6]) can heighten our sense of marvel and awaken our capacity to appreciate the glories of this world. One Benedictine woman has told me of herself and another sister getting permission from their superior, in the days before Vatican II, to don army-surplus parkas and ski-patrol pants and go cross-country skiing in the early spring. Coming to a wooded hill, the women sank in waist-deep snow and discovered at their feet a patch of hypatia blossoms. “There’d been an early snow that fall,” she said, “and those plants were still emerald green, with flower buds completely encased in ice. To me this was ‘honey from the rock’ [Ps. 81:16]. It was finding life where you least expect it.”

Sometimes these people who live immersed, as all Benedictines do, in the poetry of the Psalter, are granted an experience that feels like a poem, in which familiar words that have become like old friends suddenly reveal their power to bridge the animal and human worlds, to unite the living and the dead. Psalm 42, like many psalms, moves the way our emotions do, in fits and starts: “Why are you cast down, my soul, / why groan within me? / Hope in the Lord, I will praise God still” (v. 5). But its true theme is a desire for the holy that, whatever form it takes, seems to be a part of the human condition, a desire easily forgotten in the pull and tug of daily life, where groans of despair can predominate. One sister wrote to me: “Some winters ago, when ice covered all the lands surrounding our priory, deer came close in search of food. We had difficulty keeping them from eating our trees and even the shrubs in our cemetery.” Having been at the convent for many years, she had known most of the women buried there. One morning she woke to find that “each deer had selected a particular tombstone to lie behind, oblivious to us watching from the priory windows. The longing for God expressed at the beginning of Psalm 42, ‘Like the deer that yearns / for running streams, / so my soul is yearning / for you, My God,’ has stayed with me ever since.”

BAPTISM

OF THE LORD:

A TALE OF

INTIMACY

True intimacy is frightening, and I was well into my marriage before I realized that I either had to seek it or live a lie. Intimacy is what makes a marriage, not a ceremony, not a piece of paper from the state. I have shared great intimacy with several people; my friend dying of cancer for whom I would hold (and later clean) the bowls in which she frequently had to vomit; the monk, homosexual and resolutely celibate, with whom I’ve shared the deepest confidences. But it is only with my husband that I feel the mystery St. Paul speaks of in Ephesians, our lives so intertwined that they feel like “one flesh.”

I had forgotten how much marriage imagery