Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 30, 2020         (today’s lectionary)
The business of life
NYC, 6th Avenue and 51st Street, Manhattan. Friday, 2/18/72, 8 AM.
O Lord, you have seduced me, and I was seduced.
Myron and I bought tickets for a double feature and found seats in the Radio City Music Hall. Between movies we watched the Rockettes kick up their long, naked legs and smile at us while the music played.
One of the movies was A Clockwork Orange, a tale of murder and mayhem in Anthony Burgess’ milk bar culture, swept clean with Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.
Violence and outrage is my message
The word of the Lord becomes like fire in burning in my heart
Imprisoned in my bones.
I was 22 years old and full of lust for life. Simmering underneath, ancient not-quite-quiet hunger for God bubbled and collapsed. But I could not ignore it for long.
I am pining away for you, O Lord my God.
My soul is parched and lifeless without water.
O God you are my only hope, my help
Only in the shadow of your wings can I shout for joy.
I had hoped to help my friend Sam make movies, but his camera was stolen. My wife was with another man in North Carolina. I had an affair with Judith on the third floor of Sam’s apartment house. I struggled in the snow to find my footing. I, I, I, I …
Just across the Atlantic in Germany Philip Groning was reading about monks and monasteries.
I urge you to offer your body as a living sacrifice
Holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.
Twelve years later Philip turned 25 and decided to make a film at Grand Chartreuse, motherhouse of the Ancient Carthusian Order, established exactly 900 years earlier. He wrote to the monks, and the monks wrote back. They would think about it.
Do not conform yourselves to this age
But be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Then you may discern what is the will of God.
Sixteen years later Philip was granted permission and over two years filmed Into Great Silence, an “elegant and experiential meditation on the power of silence.”
So this is what might have happened to me in 2005, not quite sure what I was getting myself into, buying a ticket again at Radio City Music Hall, sitting alone this time in the dark, Manhattan traffic muted, deep breath and then again. The  film flickers on with a few words across the black screen.
Tu m’as séduit, o Seigneur, et moi, je me suis laissé séduire.
O Lord, you have seduced me and I was seduced.
—Jeremiah, 20:7
It begins, never a soundtrack, never even words, with a young monk praying on his knees. For three hours I live with the monks in their home in the French mountains, sharing their ora et labora, footsteps down the halls, in the barn, on the crackling leaves. Haircuts, cooking, meditation and study, chants and worship. Fires burn. The men are silent but the animals are not as they are milked, as their eggs are gathered. The sun rises, the sun sets, night falls, morning reappears. Manhattan fades away, out of sound, out of sight, never needed, gone … I, I, I, I can now be still. Even after, walking out onto the sidewalk, people rushing by, I can’t get away. And I don’t want to.
O Lord, you have seduced me, and I was seduced.
Vous me chercherez et vous me trouverez.
Car si vous me rechercherez de tout votre cœur; je me laisserai trouver par vous.
You shall seek me and you shall find me.
Because you seek me with all your heart, I will let myself be found.
—Jeremiah 29:13
At the end of his essay, “Dogma and the Universe,” C.S. Lewis writes of our precarious efforts to avoid God, and God’s determination to find us:
It may happen to any of us at any moment. In the twinkling of an eye, in a time too small to be measured, and in any place, all that seems to divide us from God can flee away, vanish, leaving us naked before Him, like the first man, like the only man, as if nothing but He and I existed. And since that contact cannot be avoided for long, and since it means either bliss or horror, the business of life is to learn to like it. That is the first and great commandment.
            (Jeremiah 20, Psalm 63, Romans 12, Ephesians 1, Matthew 16)
#
