Sacred Dwelling—Family and Spiritual Life or Praying in Chaos 

Wendy M. Wright

Wendy Wright is Catholic professor of Theology at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, and teaches in the areas of history of spirituality, family spirituality, spiritual direction and women and spirituality. A prolific author, her books include Sacred Dwelling: A Spirituality of Family Life and Seasons of a Family’s Life. She is a frequent contributor to Weavings and Family Ministry. She and her husband, Roger Bergman, are the parents of three young adults.

I am very honored to be here to be on this platform where last night Aldofo Pérez Esquivel was honored so wonderfully. I would like to dedicate this particular session to the memory of my own father who was a conscientious objector in World War II and whose witness has lived on in my own life and the lives of many others. I do that precisely because I am so touched with how this community of Christ has given itself over to the exploration of peace making, probably the most crucial and vital task for the twenty-first century. Thank you very much for inviting me and for being here.

I would like to start this session by recalling what Adolfo suggested to us in the image he asked us to take with us.  It was from Gabriel García Márquez’s story about a little boy who was given the task to put together the jigsaw puzzle of the world. As you remember the boy was able to put the world back together because on the backside there was a picture of a person. Although he did not know the world, he knew a person so he was able to piece together a whole person and in doing that he was able to recreate the whole world. I think this image speaks to me of a deep spiritual truth which is the importance of the particular, the importance for us to cultivate a sensitivity to the particular persons, events, contents of our lives. This is because it is probably easier to learn to love in generic form. In other words it is very easy to learn the art of love if you can have an ideal person or country or situations in the distance somehow. You can bring your sentiment to all of that. But it is often when we have to confront particular persons with all of their very different lives, with the ways that annoy and irritate us, or even frighten us, that it is much harder to love in the particular. So I think we begin our peacemaking, which was so wonderfully represented last night, by this global concern. I think we can concretely begin the art of peacemaking in the family, because the family really is a school of particular love.

Now obviously there are many configurations of family; these were so eloquently illustrated in the prayer this morning. However, not all families instinctively love one another, although it is easy to say that all families do love one another as a kind of given. At the same time is not enough just to have an instinctual love, a pleasurable bond, because you happen to be in the same place or grow up together. We need to learn to love well. We need to learn to love consciously. We need to learn to love one another with the recognition that we are made in the image and likeness of God, that we are children of God, and that each person we confront is a person of God, not just a reflection of our own ego, not just an extension of our hopes for our own lives.

Adolfo suggested to us as well that peace is not necessarily defined as the absence of conflict, but is a dynamic equilibrium of human relationships. Clearly also a very apt definition of a family is one that has taken its challenge to love well and to be peacemakers together seriously. Although I am going to talk about particular families, obviously what I say is not only about particular families.

I also want to say that what is most personal to us is not private. This is a really important distinction. People often make that mistake when they think of the spiritual life. They think of the spiritual life as something as between “me and God”, or just in my own private little world where I learn to be stress free and I get saved or whatever the categories are for the spiritual life. And I would suggest that although the spiritual life is profoundly personal and the spiritual life in the family is profoundly personal, it is not private. When we are most personal and when we are most true and when we love well we are in connection, in communion, with the entire human family. Love itself is the substance that connects us to every other part of the human community and the entire globe.

I invite you to reflect on your own family as I focus on what I describe as cultivating a contemplative spirit in the home. I have taught this for a long time and by trade I am a historian of Christian spirituality.  So I have studied the length and breadth of this wonderful tradition in all of its different historical and denominational and global manifestations. As I have studied this tradition in all of its interesting different particularities, I have come to feel that there is one central art that is at the root of all of the fasting, the prayers, the disciplines, the worship experiences, the works of mercy that we perform. There is one primary art, and that is the art of paying attention. I am going to expand on what that means and begin with a little story.

Monday I sent our youngest out of the door for his first full week of high school. He had risen especially early, had showered, and eaten, and was standing in the pale light of morning near the living room lamp, nervously organizing the contents of his backpack. A calculator with radicals for honors algebra, colorful spiral bound notebooks, the preferred fine point pens, a pocket size Spanish dictionary. Impulsively I swooped down on his bowed head and enfolded him in my arms and laid a kiss on the back of his exposed neck. He gave a slight shrug and a squirm, “Oh Mom”, he pleaded, half embarrassed, half annoyed by the intrusion. I resumed the distance, more conscious of the personal space needs of an emerging adolescent ego. You look so nice I couldn’t resist, I apologized.  And he did, dress codes at his college preparatory school stipulate shirts with collars, his a rich burgundy polo fresh from the store had a neat collar with pointed edges that still retained their not yet washed jauntiness. He looked wonderful.

I maintained the proper non-intrusive maternal hovering in the domestic background attitude for about the ten minutes or so before his ride arrived. When the honk came I peered around the edge of the archway separating the dining and the living rooms. He had flung his pack upon his back and stuffed his house key in the pocket of his khakis. He opened the door and then uncharacteristically, he twisted back around searching the room to see if I was there, he seemed relieved that I was. “Bye,” he gestured awkwardly.”Have a great day,” I smiled. Then with a click of the door latch he was gone.

The moment that once is so terribly mundane, and so transparently sacred, those ordinary moments that for an instant connect us to the depth, height, and width and length of love. Family life is full of them, it is also full of thousands of moments when love shows itself and we fail to notice and it is full of thousands of moments in which we come face to face with loves painful absence. If there ever was a school of love, it is in the family, a school not simply in a sense of an environment where information is passed on, but an environment that profoundly forms us. There we not only learn our lessons of the art of loving, but we may be shaped, molded, converted, and reconstructed by love itself. We may welcome family members into our lives with hearts flung so wide that they seem to break. Or we may only gradually have our hearts pried open to admit them. Either way our families teach us as no other teacher could something of the spiritual life. Something about the tenderness, ecstasy and grief of love.”¹

I start with that very ordinary little moment. No doubt you experienced a hundred such moments in your own lives. I want to explore a little a bit what it might mean to cultivate the attentiveness to which this story points, the contemplative awareness practiced in the context of family life. I think this is akin to what our speaker last night offered at the end of his talk when he said he wanted to give us his heart. To be attentive is to live with an open heart. I think all of us could agree that as much as our hearts may move within us and be stirred by a lot of things, for the most part we live with pretty stony hearts, protected hearts, battered hearts, hearts that are narrow and exclusive. How do we live with more open hearts? How do we find God in all things, in both the joy and the pain of our lives?

I will offer two stories to explore this idea further. Over the years, I have had the opportunity, particularly before the children started to arrive, to spend a fair amount of time in monastic communities with some remarkable people who have really given their lives to forming these open hearts.  Now, I am not going to suggest that family life is monastic in any way shape or form. I also am not going to suggest that the kind of quiet solitude and solemn order of a monastic community is even desirable in the incredible vitality, change, movement, noise, chaos, of most families. However, I think we can learn something about this open heartedness from monastic life.

In 1975 I went on a prolonged retreat to a Trappist monastery in northern California in the redwoods. I spent a whole semester there living with the community. Somewhere during the middle of the time I was there, when it was winter and with no other regular guests, I had one of those gift experiences that happens to us sometimes in our lives.  The community had someone else from another Trappist monastery come and give a retreat, so they ceased their regular activity. The Trappist who led the retreat, gave me two images in his talks that have been very important to me. The first was an image of what spiritual contemplative life is not.  He drew a word picture of a young woman sitting in a sunlit field, with the beautiful blue sky and flowers and sort of breathing in the beauty of everything. He said this is not the contemplative life.  The contemplative life is not an idyllic fantasy, it is not some realm of existence which is stress free where we do not have to be a human being. The other point he made which is really important is that contemplative life is about paying attention. Paying attention to the facts, about what is, about concrete reality, but also understanding that the facts of our lives are shaped by our perception, by our way of seeing. So the art of contemplation involves learning to pay attention, not to go somewhere else, or live in a fantasy world, or pretend that everything is the best of all possible worlds, but to come to what is, to the concrete, with a particular kind of awareness.

Now when I use the word contemplation, I am not talking about an advanced stage of interiority practiced only in yogic postures or deep kind of non-discursive prayer that goes by the name centering prayer. Those are wonderful practices, but I am not referring to them. Rather, I am referring to a simple whole way of seeing, a listening awareness that activates faith, hope and love and which tends to wordlessness, but which comes willing and ready to be changed.

What I am talking about is akin to what Saint Paul was talking about when he enjoined us to pray always. I don’t think that necessarily means that we are always saying prayers, reciting words, but that we enter into a kind of listening awareness that is very distinctive, a very distinctive kind of praying. If you think about it, in most of the praying that we do we act as agents. In others words we invoke, we praise, we ask for a blessing, we lament, we petition, we say things and we are the generators of the prayers. The kind of awareness and praying that I am talking about involves being other than an agent. In this type of prayer we allow ourselves to be acted upon. We practice a profound receptivity to the facts of our lives - ready receptivity, which I like to think about by using the analogy of a non-leading partner in a dance.

If you have ever been couple dancing and you have ever been the non-leading partner, you know that this is not a passive activity. A non-leading partner in a dance has to be absolutely alert, absolutely ready to dip and flow, to respond to the slightest change not only of rhythm but also to the partner’s leading. As practiced as you might be as a dancer, it is always this ready receptivity to respond that is most important.

So this distinctive kind of praying, this paying attention, has to do with allowing ourselves to be led and allowing ourselves to be responders, to come to the facts of our lives in a distinctive way. The facts, the real, cannot be approached simply as a problem to be solved. This contemplative approach does not view life or the family as a problem to be solved, but rather as a mystery to be plumbed. Problem solving is not a bad thing. We need problem solving. We need to solve specific problems, but problem solving is not enough. We need the underlying attitude that life is a mystery to be plumbed.  Life is a leading partner in a dance that is going to turn and prod us, prompt us, and dip us, and whirl us in possibly a new way. Life is an astonishment etched into the very fabric of our beings. The seeing of what is, the seeing of the people in our families, the seeing of the people in our communities, the seeing of the people in our world, the listening, the attentiveness, the running of the heart’s tentative fingers over the terrain of the real, all this must be done with reverence and with a sense of an encounter with mystery.

Another time when I was visiting a different monastery in Oregon, I was a college graduate student. The novice master said something again that struck me very powerfully. He quoted a poet and said, “To be a Christian is not to be a person who knows all the answers. To be a Christian is to be a person who lives in the part of the self where the question is constantly being born.” To live on the horizon of mystery is to live in the part of yourself that you experience when you come into the bedroom of a sleeping newborn child or when you kneel at the casket of a beloved grandparent. This is to live in the part of the self that you experience when you climb up to Sky Pond in the Rocky Mountain National Park, and you look out and see the vista. This is to live in the part of the self that knows about the mothers of Argentina and their loss of sons because of the butchery of government policy.  To live in the part of the self where the question is being born is to live into the self as mystery.

This sense of contemplative awareness plays itself out in a million different ways. It plays itself out both in the wonder of daily life as well as the pain and problems and confusion. And I think it starts with our families. In a moment I am going to read three more stories.

One is a welcoming story. I have often thought that some of the primary dynamics of family spirituality that form us are the dynamics of welcoming and then letting go. Welcoming involves being changed: when we marry, when we have children, when we adopt, when we bring someone else into our community we are initiated into the lesson of welcoming. Welcoming is hardly having a dinner party and saying, “I am going to fix this place up and have a nice meal and open the door and welcome everyone, be very hospitable and then when the meal is over send everyone home.” To welcome a family member is to open your heart twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, year after year, sharing an entire lifetime of joys and sorrows as your own. This is a matter of the formation of heart.

All of you know the experience of welcoming a family member, as joyful as that might be also requires you to do a lot of self-emptying, a lot of dying.  It teaches you about your own incapacity to love. It stretches you and challenges you. Those of you who have multiple children or dependants will know that each person who comes into your heart stretches it in a new way. Each person creates a shape in the heart that is particular, like no one else’s shape. You have to learn to make space for this person. What does it mean to love this person, in this context? What does it mean to be generous? When do I have to set boundaries? When do I encourage? When do I admonish? What does it mean to love, here and now, with this person?

The other great dynamic of our spiritual life in our families is the dynamic of letting go. Not just the kind of letting go that we do because our children are going to become their own persons. But a kind of profound letting go. This involves allowing what you have loved more than anything in the world to be entrusted to the arms of God.  As you well know that does not mean that if I pray real hard everything will turn out right. It means loving more, it means loving enough to allow God and the facts of our lives to be what they are and to find God in the mystery of our human adventure.

So now to the stories I promised to read. The first one is a story of welcoming.

My husband and I had arrived a bit late but that was not a breach of etiquette, because the invitation was open ended. The timeframe for the baby shower indicated on the invitation was Sunday from 3:00 to 5:30 p.m. nor were we the latest arrivals, another couple arrived just after we did with their toddlers in tow, still sleepy eyed from afternoon naps. The unwrapping had already begun and I slipped into a chair vacated by a colleague who had to leave early to drive her son to a soccer match. The mother to be, the wife of a university academic colleague from the philosophy department, herself an archivist at the local historical museum, was nestled in a colorful pile of tissue paper and bows trying valiantly to match gift cards with the packages that lay before her in happy confusion. To my right, an older woman, whom I soon learned, was the grandmother to be, was attempting to alleviate her daughter’s confusion by scribbling the names of gift givers on a pad of paper, not an easy task because she had just gotten off the plane from Australia.

Over the years I have become accustomed to the faintly chaotic yet wonderfully generous hospitality of the shower hosts, both are colleagues in the philosophy department, who work across the hall from my department of theology.  Those who were gathered were at all stages of the family life cycle, some like us, were facing soon to be empty nests, one couple was recently married, others counted children in the grade or high school years. A divorced colleague’s child was half a continent away, and they were all oohing and aahing as the plush bears and brightly illustrated Mother Goose books emerged from their wrappings....

Those gathered for this shower read Heidegger, Kant, Chaucer, and Cicero on a regular basis, usually in the original languages, yet when “Pat the Bunny”, emerged out of the wrappings, a universal cry of delight went up and everybody wanted the little book passed around so that they could flip the pages and rub the fuzzy bunny shaped panel of white fabric: “Now YOU pat the bunny!” The father-to-be could not quite grasp what was happening,: “Pat the bunny,” he laughed. But we were all quite serious. This small cardboard book, for most of us, carried with it the scent and feel of our own young children snuggled close and sleepy on our laps, pushing tiny fat fingers through a cardboard hole … and mimicking our words in their soft sibilant echoes.

Family life is, if nothing else, an immersion in the ever-changing passages of the human life cycle…

In several weeks after their baby is finally placed in their arms and lovingly wrapped in the crocheted comfy knitted by its Australian grandmother, Kevin and Deirdre’s baby will be brought to the baptismal fount at First Methodist. There, surrounded by family and friends it will be welcomed into the community of faith and washed in the waters of life. And those gathered will acknowledge together the infinite and almost inexpressible mystery that lingers in the remembered scent and feel of a child nestled close and sleepy in arms: “Now YOU pat the bunny.”²

Another story I want to share with you is more of an end time story and than one that opens this up to the larger world. We can talk a long time about the particular practices of peace making in the family. But is seems to me that this deep attentiveness to the mystery of our lives, the willingness to live in the part of self where the question is born, as painful or as glorious as that might be, includes the willingness to be changed by what we encounter. This means the willingness to have our hearts stretched and grown to love more generously, unconditionally to love more spaciously.

I visit the Omaha nursing facility at meal times. I am told that Bob had a run in with floor one. The discolored gaze bandage on his forehead and the rust colored stains decorating his polo shirt are evidence of the encounter. Bob has laboriously pulled his wheelchair up to the table where I am temporarily seated. Bob is one of the tablemates in the dining hall where my mother-in-law June routinely now takes her meals. On my right I am flanked by Bob’s wheelchair and June’s is on my left. She has turned to Judith on her left and is inquiring whether the tea plan for next Sunday, which the two have just mentioned will be held here in this church. Experts in aging and memory have informed me the nouns are the first to go, first the proper ones and then the commons ones. Yes, yes, here in this restaurant, Judith informs her, craning her neck and her one good ear in June’s direction. Bob determinedly wrestling opening the lips of a milk carton with his one useable hand, clarifies for me, here, here in the dinning facility.

The facility is large and light filled and is decorated in the pastels colors scheme ubiquitous to nursing care facilities, lavender tablecloths and wallpaper borders flecked with tiny pink hearts provide cheer. Dried flower wall displays create a country kitchen atmosphere.

Fred, the fourth tablemate, has just been rolled up to the table in a movable chase bed. His feet swathed in white sheets, permanently raised above the level of his head. The chaise is maneuvered sideways along the table, and a hospital tray fitted across his chest. The aide, a large silent girl of American Indian extraction, shifts Fred’s water glass and silverware off the lavender table onto the tray with a languid gesture.

My mother-in-law, a woman who for the first ninety-three years of her life was the picture of fastidiousness has collected a small nest of spaghetti strings in her lap. They escape unnoticed between tremulous fork prongs on the excruciatingly long journey across the cantilevered divide between plate and lips. Now nested, they leave a pale red trace of sauce that spreads on her skirt like a halo around the nest.

This is a place of end times, a place where the tough spiritual arts of surrender and gratitude are no longer idealistic virtues, but lessons hard lived. To be part of a family is to enter into the fullness of human life, to find God present in all things is the thrust of the adventure, to explore the human face of love in family is to probe the contour of God with us, the contours of divine love itself...

The greatest discipline in this all for me, has been the discipline of continuing to allow family life to genuinely become sacramental, to allow it to be the entry way into the invisible mystery that surrounds and supports our entire life.³

I think the central spiritual art of family life is the art of remaining attentive in this way that doesn’t try to fix things all the time. Fixing and problem solving are very important pieces of who we are, but at the same time we must continue to live in the part of the self where the question is being born; where the mystery of human life of community unfolds itself to us, where the pain of it moves us, and the joy of it allows us to live in lively ways. I think when we do this in our families and let for instance, the faces of our somewhat recalcitrant adolescent children, the presence of in laws who can sometimes be challenging, the experience of job loss, illness or the thousand difficult passages in the life cycle that impact us as family, become an entry way to knowing that God is with us, then God often offers us creative ways to become whole, to become new. This is the beginning of peacemaking, the acquisition of that flexible heart, that heart that allows itself to encounter the real with attentive listening, and allows us to be led like the non-leading partners in a dance.

The last very short story I want to share with you, connects with our speaker’s comments last night. On 9/11, 2001, when the world newspapers were filled with the terror, the drama and trauma of the events of the World Trade Center, New York, and the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., he reminded us of the unreported news of 35,000 children that had died of hunger that day.  This is a news piece that is apt and correct everyday. He focused our attention there. Again I think paying attention is an art that as we live it in the particularity of our families, we can begin to live it with our neighbors and the larger world.

On 9/11, I did what everyone else did. I immediately tried to contact my family. My mother lives in Santa Barbara. Our eldest daughter works in Los Angeles. I live in Omaha. Our son was living with us at the time as he still had to graduate. Our middle daughter was in Pennsylvania in school. So I spent quite a bit of the day doing what most everyone else was doing, connecting. Trying to make the contact with those people that are closest in heart to us. Part of that was hard because the instinct was to hold them close, to physically just gather in a space and hold each other. The telephone is a wonderful invention, but it has its limits in terms of physical proximity, but that is what we had. So I did what everyone else did which is to immediately gather in and cling to my family.

Two days later a spiritual counselor of mine, shared with me a scripture passage from the book of Habakkuk. He had been preparing a commentary on the lectionary readings for several weeks in advance, and on 9/11 he found himself reading a passage from this prophet. He found himself riveted by these ancient prophetic words,

How long O LORD? I cry for help
   but you do not listen!
I cry out to you, “Violence!”
  but you do not intervene.
Why do let me see ruin;
  why must I look at misery?
Destruction and violence are before me:
  there is strife and clamorous discord.
Then the Lord answered me and said:
  Write down the vision
Clearly upon the tablets,
  so that one can read it readily.
For the vision still has its time,
  presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint;
If it delays, wait for it,
it will surely come, it will not be late.
  --Habakkuk 1:2-3; 2:2-3 New American Bible

As I lived with this passage over the next days, its many layers began to unfold themselves. What I first heard was the assurance - that indeed the promises of God that spring from the deepest longings of our hearts and have been preached, sung, and ritually enacted and lovingly considered by so many generations of the faithful are, in fact, still trustworthy. Next I heard the cry, both mine and the author’s and, by extension, all the cries of the nameless, forgotten mothers and fathers who have instinctively tried to construct a sacred canopy over their children yet whose reach has not been wide enough. In those words I heard the anguish of families in New York ruptured in the wake of the World Trade Center collapse. I heard the terror of thousands of Afghani women and children fleeing their homeland in the paralyzing fear of a coming apocalypse. I heard the weeping of the Palestinian and Israeli parents and the late night moaning of the children of Ruwanda, Kosovo, Argentina, Iraq, and on and on.

Finally, I heard the Lord’s reply to Habakkuk, Write down the vision, write down the vision clearly on the tablets so that one can read it readily. I heard that instruction as directed toward me, toward us, as well as toward the prophet twenty-five hundred years ago. Write it down. Speak it. Live it. The vision is of a God known to us as a deeply loving parent, one who knew us before we were carried in our mother’s wombs, who attends to us with such solicitude that the hairs of our heads are counted,  who hides us in the shadow of sheltering wings, a God whose heart is pierced with love for us, who through the rush of blood and water brings us to new birth.

The vision is of ourselves, invited to love one another as we have been loved. Each of us with a new heart, a parental heart, that is stretched so far that it loves enough to let go, not only of the adult children who have out grown laps, but of the small world that stays contained within four walls on one street, and in one neighborhood. A heart that can love enough and suffer enough to pray into despair so deeply that hope emerges on the other side. A heart that can dare to entrust what is dearest [to us], to the mystery of a world that still waits for the promises. A parent’s heart ripened in its particular loving so fiercely that it can hear the cry of another’s child as its own.⁴

Notes

1. Wendy Wright, Seasons of a Family’s Life (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2003), 17-18.
2. Ibid., 162-164.
3. Ibid., 96-98.
4. Ibid., 173-174.