The interior desert
Catherine Doherty in St. George's Poustinia at Madonna House Apostolate
In the past week, I have missed the birthdays of two of my best friends. One lives out of state, but the other works in the office across from mine, so it wasn’t distance alone that made me overlook their special days.
As someone who relies on Post-It notes, pads and jotted reminders in my planner, I know that my memory for dates and numbers isn’t stellar. I can recall the lyrics to a song I last heard 30 years ago, but my friends’ birthdays don’t seem to stick in any part of my brain. I even misplaced a present purchased for one of them last week.
Even though I’m scattered when it comes to practical details like friends’ birthdays, I have become more focused on things above in the past year. Life challenges–my husband’s skull fracture and his stay at the trauma unit, our car accident that resulted in a traumatic brain injury for our daughter and financial difficulties–have multiplied, but not divided, my awareness of God. In fact, I feel closer to the saints and the unknown holy people that have preceded us in this life and will meet us in the next than ever before.
My prayer sessions have become deeper and more meaningful. They have become conversations with the divine mysteries instead of words said by rote. More than ever, I feel the presence of holiness in so many of my mundane tasks. A kenosis, an emptying, of the meaningless has taken effect to allow God to fill the void. Catherine de Hueck Doherty called that experience a time when “the need to have becomes the need not to have.”
Along the way, you don’t mind discomfort, self-gratification seems empty and you forget things like friends’ birthdays, even though you pray for them constantly. (Both of my friends have had family members who were seriously ill this year and I’ve prayed for them all.) I’ve written my friends’ birthdays in my planner so that I won’t miss them next year, but they know they’ve been in my thoughts constantly.
It’s difficult to strive to be a contemplative in this world where so many electronic devices interrupt deep prayer: if a Tweet, a text, a call, a news bulletin or an incoming fax aren’t beeping or buzzing, then there are commitments to keep. I’ve been slowly reading Poustinia, Catherine de Hueck Doherty’s book on prayer retreats from the Eastern Church, to take myself on brief, silent, prayer journeys in the middle of hectic days.
Doherty says that, even in the middle of the busiest day, we can transport our minds and hearts to a deeper union with Christ through prayer. It doesn’t matter whether we’re at the sink rinsing a cup or kneeling in church: There is always time to meet God in the stillness at the center of our being. A hermit can find that place more often, but the interior desert is open to all of us–no matter how busy we are. Poustinia, after all, means “desert” in Russian.
The friends whose birthdays I forgot have stuck by me during difficult times; they won’t abandon me because I didn’t send them a commercially designed card on time. And God is the same way: He waits for us and doesn’t abandon us if we come to Him late.
