RECOVERING

One of the first things I noticed when I could walk around again and really see things going on in my house, after living through a fight with some unknown virus that has felled even the healthiest of those living in bayou country (and further afield), was a large patch of black mildew or mold by the back door. To a compulsive cleaner, it appeared to be the accumulation of all that had been sickness and disorder, was germ-laden and anxiety-producing — this ugly, be-speckled black thing. To those who’ve never been besieged with this malady of compulsive cleaning, it was nothing but a discoloration due to moisture and would or would not disappear with a little mopping.

Then I looked out the window and saw the mound of leaves on the patio that I normally sweep away every day and which hadn’t been swept in a week. I glimpsed the bedraggled tendrils of ginger plants throughout the yard, noting that the cold spells had even killed the precious aloe plants that had lived through six or seven winters. Indoors and outdoors,  disorder was overtaking my habitat! 

Picture, if you will, a cartoon featuring Aladdin and his magic rug flying through the sky and alongside him, a woman on a similar rug vacuuming the rug as they move along on magic carpets. The man is saying to her, “Can’t you just relax a little?” Aside from the fact that the woman has long hair that still has color and she looks as though she’s enjoying herself, she could be me indulging in obsessive cleaning activity while soaring through the heavens.

So, January has passed but not the chance to take spiritual inventory again — looking at unfortunate habits like obsessive cleaning, self-interested worry, fuss, fuss (as I often described my Grandmother Nell), considering what Evelyn Underhill calls “the delightful luxury of spiritual grousing…those meditations on our own unworthiness and unfortunate temperaments (like obsessive cleaning dysfunction) and so on which we sometimes mistake for humility…” In so many words, she seemed to be saying: “So what if you don’t like black puddles and spend time scouring? You could drop all that concentration on imperfections in floors, ceilings, walls — actually of character — and give your heart and mind up to delighting in the beauty of God; e.g. the pink flowers of the enduring camellia bush beside the coulee that is blossoming despite any ministrations on your part.” I went outside and cut two blossoms from the intrepid bush, placed them in a vase in the dusty living room, and sat down to contemplate reordering spiritual priorities.

Underhill referred people in this phase of inventorying a life to St. Paul, whom she said had at least as much to put up with as most of us — uncertain health which she considered a “bad drag” on a public career; a physique not strong enough for his energetic soul, “an awkward temperament” (maybe he had a compulsive cleaning habit?)… She said St. Paul had his moments, but he wrote his most joyous epistle in Philippians while in prison, telling his followers that the Fruit of the Spirit is Joy and the rest counts as dung — I reckon like that meaningless black glob at the back door.

Well, that’s what I read this morning after seeing the dark patch at the back door when I tried not to resume my obsessive cleaning self. I went into the kitchen and opened a new bottle of cleaning vinegar, uncapped it, poured a gracious plenty of it on the offensive spot, and walked away, not yielding to the desire to scrub away at my scruples’ behest, and returning to the business of recovery.

EVELYN UNDERHILL’S CHRISTMAS GIFT

My friend, the poet Darrell Bourque, often closes his messages to me with a few words that provoke profound thought or the beginning lines of a poem, and they simmer in my mind until I allow myself to sit down, often at the busiest part of the day, to write about what he has provoked. Just yesterday, Darrell closed his e-mail with the words: “I am hoping for a quiet, uneventful Christmas; the baby Jesus slipping back peacefully and sublimely into our lives at midnight…” 

There it was — the invitation to shuck off unrest and the hecktivity of Christmas preparations and welcome the Incarnation of God. I re-read Darrell’s words, then went to the bookshelves, and the perfect reading for that respite from the “halls of folly”seemed to drop into my hands: Advent with Evelyn Underhill edited by Christopher L. Webber. I sat down while the lunch dishes churned in the dishwasher and treated myself to the work of Underhill, an Anglican mystic popular during the 1940’s. Underhill is an old friend, via the influence of my godmother Dora back in the 60’s, and is known as a kind of pioneer in the revival of interest in the spiritual life. A retreat master who helped people deepen their lives through prayer, meditation, reading of the mystics, and charitable acts, she had more than a few words to relate about “the baby Jesus slipping back peacefully and sublimely into our lives…”

Underhill said that Reality is being offered to us in the “simplest, homeliest way — emerging right into our ordinary life. A baby — just that.” [And isn’t that what Darrell said?] “We are not told that the Blessed Virgin Mary saw the angels or heard the Gloria in the air. Her initiation had been quite different, like a quiet voice speaking in our deepest prayer — ‘The Lord is with thee. Behold the handmaid of the Lord.’ Humble self-abandonment is quite enough to give us God.’”

Well, there it is…an invitation to dismiss what Underhill calls “craving, clutching, and fussing on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual — even on the religious—plane…Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life…”

Most of these quotations are derived from Light of Christ within the cover of The Fruits of the Spirit, a worn copy of which always accompanies my moves from Louisiana to Tennessee and return, and Christopher Webber seems to have been inspired by many of the same passages I’ve marked in my falling-apart edition of this book. Underhill writes that the people of our time are variously helpless, distracted, and rebellious, “unable to interpret that which is happening, and full of apprehension about that which is to come, largely because they have lost this sure hold on the eternal; which gives to each life meaning and direction…I do not mean this is a mere escape from our problems and dangers, a slinking away from the actual to enjoy the eternal. I mean an acceptance and living out of the actual, in its homeliest details and its utmost demands …with that peculiar sense of ultimate security which only a hold on the eternal brings…”

A concluding comment from Underhill to which Darrell alluded in his wish to live out a quiet uneventful Christmas: “…We are required to go on quietly, making root…docile to the great slow rhythm of life. When we see no startling marks of our own religious progress or our usefulness to God, it is well to remember the baby in the stable and the little boy in the streets of Nazareth. The very life was there present, which was to change the whole history of the human race…the hidden Will of God…”

Peace and Joy to readers all.

ON THE EVE OF EVELYN UNDERHILL’S FEAST DAY

Today is the Feast Day of Evelyn Underhill, Anglican writer and mystic often described as someone who, in the first five decades of the 20^th century, was one of the most widely read authors on prayer and the spiritual life in the world. I’ve conducted several retreats featuring Evelyn’s work, and ‘though some readers may call my ruminations outdated, I continue to quote her in sermons and read her works monthly.

Evelyn Underhill loved to attend and, later, to conduct retreats at Pleshey House in the village of Pleshey in England, a place now known as “The Retreat House,” where Evelyn made her first retreat in 1921. Later, it became the spot where she conducted her first retreat during Lent, 1924. She became the best known retreat director of her time and described Pleshey (her favorite retreat house) as a place “soaked in love and prayer.”

Every summer, as part of my commitment as an Associate of St. Mary’s Convent at Sewanee, I attend the silent retreat, and this year I fortuitously noticed that Evelyn Underhill’s feast day occurs this day before the retreat begins. So I began reading The Fruits of the Spirit again, Evelyn’s notable work first published in the 1940’s. A memoir of Evelyn Underhill by Lucy Menzies, one of the frequent retreatants during Evelyn’s lifetime, includes the guru of retreat master’s thoughts about how to prepare for a retreat. Evelyn writes a recipe for recovering “spiritual poise,” as she calls it — she says that we don’t go to retreats to gain spiritual information but for spiritual food and air — to wait on God and renew our strength not for our own selves but for the sake of the world.

That one sentence set me straight about the real reason for retreat. Evelyn says that anyone can retire into a quiet place and have a thoroughly unquiet time in it—but that isn’t making a retreat. “Shut the door,” she says. “Nearly every one pulls it to and leaves it slightly ajar so that a whistling draught comes in from the outer world with reminders of all the worries, interests, conflicts, joys and sorrows of daily life. But Christ said ‘Shut the door,’ and he meant Shut.” A retreat, Evelyn emphasizes, isn’t self exploration, but communion with God so that afterwards you’re more powerful interceding for others and experience such self loss in Him that your wounds will be healed by new contact with his life and love. In other words, if you follow her counsel for a good retreat, you may return to “ordinary time” and move about in the world emanating a bit more humility and charity. I don’t need to remind anyone of how much we need the latter two qualities nowadays.

Evelyn reminds us that there are three points in which we can respond to God’s creative will for us: 1) our prayer; 2) our work or service, the middle point between our action toward and with God; and 3) our action toward men.  The entire chapter on “Preparation” in The Fruits of the Spirit could be handed out to every retreatant who enters this “thin place” that is St. Mary’s of Sewanee, or any retreat space, and major transformation would result, I think. That transformation is not only the objective of retreats but the answer to all that is burdensome to us when we finally tune into the world again – an acknowledgement that the spiritual growth of humans has to do with the “creaturely status of man and thus the gathering of man into communion with God.”  

On this day, Evelyn reminds us that all must be subdued to the law of charity, and that all must be colored by the joy and peace of our spiritual inheritance carried through with patience, faithfulness and humility.

Pardon the “preach,” but on second thought, just order a copy of The Fruits of the Spirit and sit with it a spell.

P.S. That battered-looking copy of The Fruits of the Spirit that appears above has survived 53 years and was given to me by my godmother Dora on the occasion of my first visit to Blacksburg, Virginia to be with her and godfather Markham. It came directly from one of her shopping trips in London and resulted in my return to the Anglican fold after a 12-year hiatus in church attendance.