The Spirit of God always surpasses our dreams or desires. The Spirit expresses for us the God in Christ who cannot be managed, who is “continually spilling over,” the God who is exquisitely present within yet ungraspable, indescribable, the Spirit who is the vital atmosphere that gives us breath and life, surrounding us and granting us greater intimacy with God, who keeps us open to the More that God is, beyond our imaginings or our manipulation. The Spirit brings unity, always respecting difference, and enlivening reciprocity.
“The Spirit is at the place of our desiring,” the inarticulate groan that begs for Christ to surround and indwell and sustain us in the incompleteness of love. And as monks we know that this is where we live- in this land of desire, somehow suspended between heaven and earth, getting glimpses of heavenly communion, visits of the Word, noticing his kind and loving presence but more often left hanging, because our desire always outstrips our present capacity. And so, we’re left suspended, longing for more, but often losing our way. We live in an in-between place- poised in faith between a promised heavenly homeland and an earthly home; puzzled and sometimes impatient because earthly existence even for all its ambiguities is at least tangible and real. And as we wait, we keep on doing what we’re doing- trying to notice the ordinary charged with mystery, in this place of already and not yet.
Some years ago, it was my privilege to work with mentally disabled children at a home in Chicago, operated by the Sisters of Mercy. It was called Misericordia- literally in Latin the home of the pitying heart. Eventually, it became a L’Arche village. I helped each week at a Mass for the children; they were wonderfully affectionate; I got so many hugs. Since they could not articulate well, they had been taught the sign language of the deaf. And all during the Eucharist they signed the hymns and responses exuberantly. "Lord" was an L that flew out from the heart; "Jesus", fingers pointing to the wounds in his hands. Mass there was like nothing I had ever experienced. I remarked to my friend, the priest who presided there, how amazing it was. "It's no wonder at all," he said. "You see, they're inefficient, not good at accomplishing tasks all week long, but they are perfect at Liturgy. They're perfectly at home praising and praying and loving. They get easily absorbed because they're so inefficient."
With our best Cistercian intuition, we are always trying to be efficient; more jam, more chasubles in fewer minutes, for we are after all called to work, faithful to Benedict's Rule. "They are truly monks when they live by the work of their hands." But very soon we come to realize that the efficiency, proficiency, and productivity we need to make some great jelly or the perfect vestment are not going to work when we go to prayer. We need another set of skills, skills for suspension and inefficiency- learning how to be satisfied with waiting, learning how to depend totally on Christ’s kind favor, his timing; practicing being at home with powerlessness, for Christ only wants our weakness.
Such is the continuing mode of God’s coming toward us in Christ. And our work here in this school of love, this house of his Misericordia, this home of the pitying heart of Christ, is to continually stoke our desire for Christ, so to be available for his pleasure, his timing. We know that Christ Jesus our Lord likes to sneak in like a bandit into the grey inefficiency of our ordinariness. As Michael Casey likes to say, contemplation, true prayer, depends on this “rubbish of our lives,” for it happens when we have nothing to be proud of.
