The Star at the End of the River: Meditations on a Homeward Journey

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

(I)

The Mediocre Mystic

(II)

Dark Run

(III)

An Observer’s Chair

(IV)

The Ecstasy of Somewhere

(V)

The Prayer of Gooseflesh

(VI)

The Road to Frosty Drew

(VII)

Cum Mortuis

(VIII)

The Web of Finalities

(IX)

The Star at the End of the River

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

I have never done this before—written a short memorandum of acknowledgment, that is. I have read many, of course; and what surprises me the most is how few offer thanks to that mysterious Presence that inspires people to do anything at all, at whatever index of quality. To that One, then, I offer my first gesture of gratitude. Next I must mention those whom I haven’t the space to identify specifically: ancestors, friends at various times of my life, neighbors, work colleagues, and fellow communicants in parishes to which I have belonged. I am grateful for the contribution of all of these souls to my life’s journey.

As regards those whom I want to name, I must first mention my sister Barbara. The simple fact is that this book would not have been written without her constant urging. For as long as I can remember, she has advised me to write down my ideas; now that I have done so, I render her my heartfelt thanks. Her husband Norm, a faithful conversation partner, also gave continual encouragement. My cousin Jan, her husband Norman, their children and grandchildren many times expressed interest in my progress. Finally, my wife Cathy’s family—twelve siblings; over thirty nieces and nephews (some of whom have been overnight guests in our house); and a wonderful mother-in-law—have gifted me in ways hard to express in words.

I wish to thank specifically the following persons—dear friends and fellow seekers—who read parts of the manuscript and offered enthusiasm and helpful criticism: William Bourdeau, Gary Farias, Sue Kent, and Valerie and Henry Nash. I am also indebted to my spiritual director, Sister Virginia Sampson, for her interest in the project. A word of thanks is in order to Professors John Lawless and Patrick Reid of Providence College for their aid with some Latinisms about which I needed clarification. I am deeply grateful to Gary Farias, a multi-talented artist, who drew the two splendid diagrams in chapter nine. And I would be remiss if I failed to cite with thanksgiving the assistance and, above all, the patience of the staffers at iUniverse, publishers of this book.

Lastly, I name my loyal partner in life, Cathy, who has helped in this project in more ways than I can name. I dedicate this book—and all my moments—to her.

Bristol, Rhode Island

March 2, 2010

 (I)

The Mediocre Mystic

Happy the pilgrims inspired by you with courage to make the ascents.

Psalm 84 (New Jerusalem Bible)

For some reason, on the way to a church supper a few years ago, I blurted out to my wife Cathy that I thought I was a mystic, just not a very good one. I’m not even sure what I meant—perhaps that my only random attention to things spiritual, and meager results, compared poorly when measured against such titans of the art as Jesus, the Buddha, and St. John of the Cross. But I already knew that my statement ran counter to the advice of so many mentors, who counseled against such comparisons and self-evaluations as being gratuitous and, in the end, unhealthy. Better to have said simply (another evaluation!) that I felt drawn to the mystical life—which I did, and do.

But what exactly is it that I am I drawn to? Among the definitions of mysticism to be found in my modest library on the subject are the following: a stretching out of the soul into God through unifying love; an intuition that transcends the temporal categories of the understanding; or simply union with reality. Bede Griffiths, in his remarkable book The Marriage of East and West, sums up these descriptions nicely in his discussion of the Hindu doctrine of non-duality, which describes a faculty deep within all human beings by which they are moved to oneness with the source of cosmic unity through an immediate experience. For me, the mystical life has always included the sense that reality had a generous thickness perpendicular to, or athwart, the merciless drumbeat succession of moments that often dominates our life awareness. I realize in retrospect and with humility that on a number of occasions I have been allowed to enter into the blessed thickness, this book being a partial record of such experiences. So, harking back to the conversation with my wife, I have dropped the self-description of not very good mystic and have settled instead on a designation of mediocre mystic, which will strike some as not much better.

Mediocre is nothing less than a despised adjective, a label everywhere and always to be avoided. Over the years, its connotation of less than desirable quality has grown like a barnacle over what the word actually denotes: of the middle, ordinary. The application of the term to one’s general spiritual life seems dubious, to the deeper mystical life, even more problematic. And yet, at second glance at least, the ordinary is not at all out of place in the sphere of religion.

Shunryu Suzuki, the great teacher of Zen, has described the practice of meditation as nothing special, meaning that, properly understood, it is nothing more nor less than life itself—an odd notion when one reflects that the object of such meditation is to achieve union with reality, the divine, or the timeless. But then we have Jesus telling his listeners in the Sermon on the Mount that life is more than food, the body more than clothing, coaxing them, in effect, to become mystics—this, to people who did not have enough to eat, only the clothes on their backs and therefore, of necessity, primarily concerned with the here and now. The inescapable conclusion? Mysticism is the proper business of all humankind, or, with apologies to Aristotle, man is a mystical animal. If so, not the least of the outrages suffered by the desperately poor of this world is that the unjust conditions that they endure prevent them in the overwhelming number of cases from embarking on the mystical journey, which is their fundamental calling as human beings.

If all human beings are mystics, most must be mystics of the middle, mystics of the ordinary, mediocre mystics, I aver. The history of mystical experience is replete with theophanies, stigmata, wrestlings with angels, beatific visions—in short, somethings special. I make no adverse comment on these singular happenings, and indeed own as not the least of my beliefs that the God of surprises is joyfully active in our world and universe, leaving His luminous footprints in out-of-the-way places and touching people with holy magic. But centuries of human experience have shown that for most of us, most of the time, it is not so. We, the happy company of mediocre mystics, must find the way in via the nothing special of everyday living in all its ordinariness. My own faith community, Catholic Christianity, which has at its center a very special divine intervention into human affairs, nevertheless recognizes this by designating over half of its celebratory year as ordinary time.

Lately I’ve been thinking that, if the mystic of special revelation is expecting an angel, the mediocre mystic would do better to contemplate an angle. For the former, entrance into mystical experience is more nearly at right angles to the time stream, interrupting the flow; for the latter, it is at an acute angle, never that far from the actual experiences themselves. It is here too, that, seeing the mystical life under a different, but time-honored metaphor, the word mediocre can be of further service.

The suffix of mediocre is from the Old Latin, and before that, Greek, meaning hill or mountain (ocris, okris/akros, as in Acropolis). Etymologically speaking, mediocre means halfway up a mountain. I find this interesting because a historically favored figure for the mystical journey is the climbing of a mountain—Mount Tabor, Mount Sinai and, not least, Mount Carmel, being three venues appropriated metaphorically by ascetic theologians and spiritual writers of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. One can see why the image has been irresistible, based on certain assumptions about human life, namely, that the path to the divine is a constant struggle up against the gravity of sensuality and all that is summed up in the concept of the flesh. The earnest pilgrim is pictured here negotiating the path of perfection at a daunting, nearly right angle of ascent and within a landscape of apparent barrenness, fearful crags, and major catastrophes of backsliding. In this theater of understanding, mediocre mysticism, satisfied with a halfway-up journey, could only be deemed a failure of the spirit.

But what if we were to see that the mediocre mystic ascends not halfway up a mountain, but up a halfway mountain? The image of such a mountain first broke through to me when I was examining my niece Abby’s middle school general science text. There, in a section entitled Using Simple Machines, I saw next to the pulley, the lever, and the wheel and axle a picture of the mountain of middle mysticism: the inclined plane! Here again is the acute angle of entry into the heavenly precinct, but conceived now as an angle of ascent—the slowly rising path, so convenient for transferring crates in warehouses and finding God along a manageable slope.

It was the way of the tribe of Judah returning from exile in Babylon and of all Jewish festival pilgrims as they joyfully sang their songs of ascent to Jerusalem, memorialized in Psalms 120–134. These are the so-called gradual psalms, hymn-prayers whose very name describes the way of the mediocre mystic, ascending to the divine presence by slow degrees; journeying, sometimes haltingly, up the inclined plane. And if scaling the steep mountain of traditional mysticism requires courage, so too does the gradual upward climb: a courage to persevere in the search for the divine in the nearness of routine and in the predictability of the events of an average life.

This book is one man’s gradual, a song of an unremarkable ascent. It is filled with the media through which I have experienced the touch of God, alongside the ritual celebrations of my own religious community: words, music, and ideas; people I have known; places that have spoken to me; events charged with heavenly resonance; hobbies and avocations—chief among them, night sky observing, every aspect of which for me has a divine nimbus.

I venture that there are no new ideas to be found within these pages. Why, then, even bother putting pen to paper or, rather, fingers to keyboard? Because, although this is a book about what, at bottom, I believe everybody knows, it is at the same time a record no one else could write. Every person who ever was born has a divine music within them—a song of the personal ascent. Why else were individuals created but to do this irreplaceable singing for others to hear? And, if it is not a book, then something else—whatever God has given. But to sing at all costs is the human vocation, even if off-key, and to ascend, ever homeward, the inclined plane.

 (II)

Dark Run

I turn away, turn to the holy, inexpressible mysterious night.

Novalis, Hymns to the Night

Night holds no terrors for me.

Antiphon for Psalm 91, Compline

I could feel pressure on my right forearm, but it wasn’t an affectionate squeeze. I knew it was Cathy, who was sitting right next to me; it was obvious that she was grasping my wrist to alert me about something. As I leaned over to find out what was wrong, she was already whispering in my ear: You’re grimacing!

I was. We were at Sunday Mass, and the lector had just completed proclaiming the second reading for the thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, taken from the first letter of Paul to the Thessalonians. The offending line, which made my face a study in unpleasantness, read as follows: All of you are children of light and of the day. We belong neither to darkness, nor to night. As I was listening to this—one of the charter documents of my religious tradition—my heart was silently screaming No!; for without a doubt, if I am anything at all, it is a child of night darkness. Since my youngest years, and especially since adopting astronomy as a principal interest, I have looked forward with hope and joy to sunsets and oncoming nights, a counter-attitude to a thousand religious metaphors. As I slumped in the pew, I felt for a moment like a spiritual orphan, unable to receive the good news like everyone else.

Affinity to darkness and the night is one of several disenfranchisements from biblically based religion that afflict identifiable groupings of individuals, exclusions that range from the relatively harmless to the quite serious. Left-handers have to endure repeated references to a position of preferment at the right hand of the Father and other rightward honorifics. More unsettling are the passages that can wound infertile couples, such as Genesis 29, where God seems to manipulate the procreative faculties of Leah and Rachel. Hannah’s bargaining with God for a son and even the beloved Magnificat can be painful in this context. And perhaps no one experiences a greater isolation from so much in biblical literature as the human person who happens to be a female.

Scripture scholars and biblical theologians will immediately say that I have missed the point, that by the technique of hermeneutics all of these passages should be retrieved for their spiritual meaning; properly understood, no one falls outside the canopy of their positive intent. I certainly concur and in my heart believe they are right; it’s just that at first contact these scripture passages can sting the excluded party. Indeed, long after that person has understood their esoteric meaning, a fresh hearing can still cause momentary alienation.

And so it is with my love affair with night darkness. Except for a few notable passages—Psalm 19 comes to mind, and even here night gets only equal billing with day—the Bible has cast darkness and the night right behind the devil as