I am at home, now for the fifth day in a row, having spent the last month plus on the road, flying in and out of Houston every few days like some manic tourist of life: to L.A. for family affairs; to Indianapolis for a consultation on “Sustaining Pastoral Excellence” (you read it correctly); then New York City for a vacation with the darling and friends; and finally hottern hell Nashville last week for the Abbots’ Council to prayerfully consider (as we say) the future of our Companions prayer community. I’m pretty sure I spent more time in airports and on planes than with the people I traveled to see, and had already lost my humor for flying after the L.A. trip, apologizing for my snarling on the way home from the airport at She Who Endures with the sudden realization, “I used to like flying. I don’t anymore.” She wrote it off as mere irritation with the 5-hour delay I’d just experienced in Phoenix (turning the red-eye into the red-faced). I experienced a little deeper understanding from her after our flight to NYC was diverted from La Guardia to Newark because it has longer runways and a “minor hydraulics problem” meant landing faster than usual; then a hasty shift to D.C., the captain’s competent voice announcing calmly, “Uh, folks, we’ve just declared an air emergency, and will be landing at Dulles, which is closer.” Apparently the hydraulics problem was something a bit other than “minor”, eh?
 
The landing went fine, with people breaking into applause when the plane stopped moving; the darling’s fingernail gouges in my arm would disappear a day or so later. During the 4 1/2 hour wait in Washington, I recalled for her and E Z Don that the hideous airplane crash in Sioux City a couple of decades back was the result of a hydraulics failure, which they didn’t much appreciate hearing; but for me it brought back memories of a prayer pal—Greg—from those days. We were in the same companions (“covenant”) group, and he’d joined the Air National Guard in Iowa as a chaplain; working the crash site became his gig for months and, in fact, years. In our quarterly gatherings we sat and listened and grunted and prayed with him as he agonized through the job of speaking God authentically human in the face of this horror. Later he wrote a book about it, and even appeared in the movie–the preacher kneeling on the tarmac while the credits are run, as I recall.
 
We eventually made it to New York City, ready for “a bite of the Big Apple”, as E Z put it, and were joined the next day after our visits to the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island (to see Sue’s grandparents’ names on the immigrant wall), Ground Zero (a construction site), and The Slaughtered Lamb–which would become a repeated watering hole—by Two-Swipe Carolyn, who earned that moniker for her inability to get through the subway gates with only one swipe of the pass; usually, E Z Don was hauling ass down the concourse heading on to the train while she was still playing with the entry machine. E Z loves New York, having lived there for a year on internship, and having made pretty much annual pilgrimages back since, even hauling his youth groups and other church folks there. Two-Swipe had been on some of those trips, and knew what to expect. For the darling and me it was a first. I was overwhelmed by it, telling E Z on the second night, even as we just sat in Union Square about midnight chuffing a cigar while watching people, “There’s too much input. It’s like sensory overload.” “Yep. It’s an altogether different world.”
 
We caught a Yankees game, three Broadway musicals, and an off-Broadway thing called “Naked Boys Singing” which was, in fact, exactly that (and could just as truthfully have been titled, “Naked Boys Swinging”); I envied the musicians playing in Les Miserables and Chicago, and remembered my show-playing days in L.A.; didn’t much care for Spring Awakening (adolescent sexual angst of end-of-the-19th- century “Victorian” Germany set to 21st century rock music not being my cup of tea, despite its Tony award: teens are horny, parents are repressed, ho hum, what’s new about that?, except that the exposed breast there took itself ever so much more seriously–thus pathetically and adolescently self-righteously—than the swinging tallywhackers of off-Broadway dancing to “The Bliss of a Bris” ). We strolled and ate in Little Italy and then in Chinatown, and did the Times Square shuffle. E Z’s three-mile hiking detour through Central Park in search of the short route to the Museum of Fine Arts was redeemed by a street musician carrying us away in the blues with a guitar and harmonica; he was by far the best of such artistes, though the tap dancer on the subway platform, foot-riffing for 15 minutes on a 3 x 3 piece of plywood in that stifling heat and noise of trains and crowds was pretty impressive, too. The cleverest was two guys bursting into the car and into a quick doo-wop duet between stations with a loosely rolled newspaper as the rhythm section. Funny how something like that can break the anonymity of a subway car, creating a “we” for a moment. Once, I never saw them get on, but all of a sudden there were four cops in the car doing some kind of cop thing beyond riding; chasing somebody; “Germany, 1934″ flashed into my mind like a balloon over the scene, and I pretended not to be there. My traveling partners were impressed with how I held it together, though they didn’t know about the balloon, just from their experience of traveling with me. My angst was nothing though when compared to the darling’s tooth pain, which set in a couple of days before the end, inserting into the agenda dentist’s phone calls and a trip to the pharmacy for pain killers with the side effects of knock-out drops, and culminated in a root canal the day after we got back. I’m going to write a travel book called “New York on $500 a Day (After Airfare and Hotel)”. It was good; just as getting home was.
 
It’s been, now, thirteen days since I wrote the paragraphs above, as the penalty for not doing my anti-depressant (anti-d’s) pill paperwork kicked in with its black hole vengeance of despair, the effort of clawing at the darkness slamming a dead stop on such nonsense as writing (to no one who wants to read it anyway, as per the Darkness): when you’re up to your ass in nothingness, creation ain’t gonna happen. I went three weeks without Auntie D for not renewing the prescription. The first two are bearable, though with an edginess borne of increasing anxiety; the third week brings on that event horizon of the Black Hole sucking you in. That’s when the effort of fighting nauseous waves of hopelessness suck up all the energy with the battle between feeling and knowledge, constantly repeating, “Larry, it’s the depression,” rather like whistling in the dark.
 
Of course the timing of this go-around was particularly bad, coming as it did just a few weeks after my brother’s death; so, “Dad died at 65. Dan died at 64. I turn 59 next week.” Not a pleasant thought under the best of circumstances; in the Black Hole it is the taunt of despair, Eliot’s eternal footman snickering. I told E Z Don, “It’s a bitch when you can put a number on your days.”
 
Of course, not even that was enough for this psychic masochist, who, at the same time, forced myself to push through James Carroll’s massive history, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power—500+ big pages of little print detailing the increasing militarization of American government through the enormous power of the Pentagon, through the terrors of the Cold War and the failure of all our presidents–except two: Kennedy and Reagan (!)—to do anything to control the proliferation of thermonuclear weapons. It’s depressing (of course), especially given the lunatics running our current administration and their maniacal fixation on war as salvation; the bullying threat of war as diplomacy. An aside: there was a bit of a hubbub a couple of months ago when Hillary Clinton chastised Barack Obama for saying that as president he would pledge that the U.S. would never launch a first nuclear strike against, I think, Pakistan. Her argument was that a president should never make that kind of unilateral declaration, that showing how inexperienced he is. So, now, let me see: according to her, the United States should never pledge not to start a nuclear war? This will go a long way to easing the fears of the rest of the world about us, eh? Hell, it certainly doesn’t ease my fears about “us.” But I’m depressed.
 
Or, was. Auntie D’s back and doing her work. So it goes.
 
For the first couple days in Nashville our work was guided by Sister Kathleen, a short stout Benedictine nun with a lovely rap-your-knuckles bluntness, an amazing mind, and a prayer life deeply rooted in the community of her order; she knows big time stuff about the realm of the spirit because she lives it. And she knows what it means to live together as a community of prayer. Which, of course, was the purpose of our meeting, i.e., to explore if and how the Companions prayer community of which we’ve been a part for two and a half years might continue on in some form; “we” being the “Abbots’ Council” formed at our last gathering in April to tend to that. Thus the sis led us in a process of “discernment”, which is spiritualese for thinking about things, albeit with a bit of a different twist: intentionally inviting the presence of another, ala, “Jesus”, “Christ”, “Spirit”, or etc. It does tend to put a different perspective on things, particularly in the context of creative discussions (“What shall we do?!”) adding a substantial degree of mutual respect, if not necessarily voices from heaven: praying together means at least a willingness to look beyond ourselves, “beyond our fears, beyond our dreams, from death into life,” as the phrase has it. Searching the mind and energy pulsating life through the universe and history, that mind and energy out of which Jesus–and his ancestors before him–lived; seeking for our own moment how that energy might be present.
 
Pretty spooky, eh?
 
And yet, I can’t say I’ve ever met anybody who does not have some kind of private and personal conversation going on with god or the universe; like Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof”, we each have our conversations with the “Creator”, “Higher Power”, “Jesus”, and, yes, I suspect, “Mohammed” too (ala a book title that caught my eye: One River, Many Wells). For any number of folks these conversations—prayers—are carried out casually, as it were, say in the car on the way to work. For some others “prayers” are carried out at a regularly appointed time and place. And for some few others like Sister Kathleen, their lives are immersed in it as their days are organized around this “spiritual discipline.” They find their comfort and energy in prayer, listening for the voice of the universe. American Protestantism, especially, lays out the expectation in its little tune, “And he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own.”
 
And who knows? Perhaps that is indeed the elementary experience of prayer once we get past jabbering our Jesus weejus Christmas list. Perhaps when we try a little silence, when we listen (for a change) for what might be being said to us, we, too, might hear that “he tells me I am his own.” Have we not known those moments even in prayer when God is in his heaven and all is right with—our—world? The German theologian Helmut Thielecke once said, “People who never pray are doomed to live in fear, because the heavens are forever closed to them.” Yeah. We think the really good (sainted) pray-ers know this presence of the mind of life spoken through Jesus: “and he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own.”
 
Enter, however, Mother Teresa, the saint of India’s poor, caring for the trash-heap of humanity living in the trash dumps of Calcutta, for which she got a Nobel Peace Prize. One would assume that her free and loving participation in this squalor would have been rewarded in some way by the presence of Jesus in her prayers. After all, that’s what got her there in the first place: he came to her in prayer and said, “Will you do this for me? Will you care for these people?” That was in 1947. And that was, as the news broke about it while we were in Nashville, the last time save for a brief word in 1959 that she heard from him. The news was of a book just released about her conversations with her Confessor (say, spiritual guide) called Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. Thus just three months before the Nobel prize she tells him: “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.” For 50 years the silence and emptiness was unrelenting: “If I ever become a Saint – I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from Heaven—to [light] the light of those in darkness on earth.”
 
Not quite Jesus “walking and talking with me” is it?
 
Of course, the contemplatives (the ancient term, “mystics”) have historically borne witness to the “dark night of the soul,” those days of spiritual dryness, speaking and praying into nothing but the vacuum of space. Most of us know those days for a bit, and then they pass. What makes Teresa’s story so awesome is that she continued to live with and for the trash of humanity out of her love for Jesus even though Jesus was nowhere to be found or heard for 50 years. She gave her life; he, apparently, didn’t notice; an unrequited love, it seems.
 
That in itself is a story worth the read (which I’ll be doing as soon as I get the book). But I was equally fascinated by a comment somebody made along the way, suggesting that perhaps the reason why the Vatican (who controls such things) allowed her story to be made public in spite of her professed desires that it not be, is because there are these days a lot of people and powers claiming the revelation of God and willing to torment others and kill over it, ala, “This is the will of God.” Perhaps this saint of the trash heaps and a dark, empty universe can lead us into a little humility when we are so certain of what “God” is saying to us. And perhaps the humility borne of a silent god who does not comfort will lead us to live with our neighbors out of the desperate knowledge that comfort and security are to be found only by living peacefully and justly with the whole human community.