Wednesday Wonder

July 21, 2010

I have retreated in this monastery before, years ago, located as it is in the deep outreaches of the wild Missouri Ozarks. For over 60 years the Assumption Abbey has been a place of Christian community and contemplation. As a member of the Trappist Order of the Cistercian tradition, it has always practiced silence and the seven distinct hours of prayer each day, the first beginning at 3:30 a.m. and the last at 7:30 p.m. These are people who inhale the Psalms like most people breathe air. Like most Catholic religious orders these days the numbers are waning and the future is uncertain. But even so they continue to provide hospitality to guests, one of the chief practices of monastic life.

Sister Ann Marie, the only nun appointed as guest master at the Abbey, fields my question about the location of the prayer path. “Well,” says the diminutive, gray haired woman, “the entrance to the path is about 100 yards that way.” She points off toward the south and continues, “It’s really a Stations of the Cross, and the path continues beyond the stations. They say if you keep on going it ends up in a place you can find your way back, but I’ve never been there so I can’t vouch for it personally.”

As I walked out the door I was met by three dogs lolling around the cloister porch. And they were all excitement. “Can we walk the Stations of the Cross, too, huh, huh?” they seemed to ask. “Sure, come walk the stations with me,” I answered.

The path began just as she said it would and the dogs ran up ahead, doing dog devotions along the way, which included such things as running, marking the trail with their pee, and chasing random squirrels.  I, on the other hand, followed more of the human approaches to prayer, and I paused at each station like a train slowing for each railway platform. There was the trial, the procession, the falling, help, his mother, death and death transcended. To walk the Stations of the Cross is like walking the world; it holds the dark-hearted and brave, heinous intentions and compassion, descent and ascent, despair and hope. And the forest provided the background, a leafy frame to the portrait, something green when the story turns brown.

It’s not hard praying in the woods. You just make like a tree. Trees have prayer down to a fine art. Rooted in the earth, reaching up to the skies, taking light into themselves, sheltering creatures in their branches, it just seems natural that the end of life will be their own return to the earth to provide soil for more growth. Trees know how to be. It’s easy to pray when you are surrounded by trees.

The Stations ended and then, just as the sister had said, the path continued on. And should I? The dogs answered my question. They bounded on ahead, knowing where we should go. The more we walked the thicker the fern cover became, and the encompassing canopy of the tree tops closed over, shading all beneath, and only sparingly allowing the sunlight to penetrate directly.

The dogs disappeared off the trail, and I heard splashing below. They had found the stream that ran down the valley and were wading and drinking in it. The stream, it ends up, was the guiding principle of the trail, and not the other way around. Trails of both human and animal varieties wound back and forth, criss-crossing the stream, and sometimes followed it directly, sometimes diverged and headed away. The dogs ran ahead, periodically moving to higher ground and scouting along the ridge. They often had to wait for their much slower moving human partner to catch up.

At times the path seemed to disappear, but would soon enough reappear, sometimes on the other side of the stream. Other times there was nothing except for maybe three stones that formed a little bridge in the stream, evidence of past life forms. Trees were felled across the path and dogs and human alike needed to search out detours and alternate routes.

Finally, after several hours of sojourning, the stream trickled off out of sight, the path came to an end, the dogs had taken leave of me, and I was alone in a deep, quiet glen.

“I know exactly where I am on the planet,” I thought. “I’m right here and here is a very good place to be, as good as any other place. I am exactly here. I don’t know my destination, not exactly, and that’s fine, too. It will end where and how it does.” And so I sat.

What I didn’t know, but was soon to discover, was that I had come to the end of any marked path, at least marked by a human. We all come to those places when we have to navigate without maps, or recommendation, or failsafe rules. A new order of trust is required, like Abraham striking out from home with only the promise that God will show the way. Going without knowing becomes the order of the day.

When that time comes, and there is no map, we trust other things. The stream becomes the orienting guide because it was the first term and will lead to the last. When the path disappears the stream becomes the path. And God, like the stream, keeps running through our lives when our path runs alongside the stream of God, or intersects it, or disappears into it, but the stream always exists, when we see it and when we don’t.

One of the three dogs, a Black Lab, wandered back into my holy glen, and I immediately took him into my confidence. “So, where are your other friends?” They had obviously headed off toward the scent of home, every dog for itself. Black Lab listened to my monologue, my attempt to talk myself out of the forest: “Ok, the low water bridge was west of the monastery, and according to the sun, that’s east, so … that way!” With great drama, I pointed in the direction of my guess. And then off we went.

Black Lab got up and ran ahead of the direction I was walking. As the undergrowth became thicker, with no paths in sight, we navigated by the sun. We proceeded on until only the dog could squeeze through the brambles. Rock ledge bluffs rose to our left, a good sign in defining a valley. And just as I declared with total confidence that we were heading the right direction my foot became tangled in a vine and I tumbled forward, in the most uncoordinated kind of way, and struck my knee against a rock. Ouch.

As I sat and waited for the throb to go away, I looked up and under the branches and saw … water, lots of water. It was a river, the river that received the tributary we had followed all morning. And in the distance there was the sound of falls, those I had seen just a few days earlier. Follow the sun. Follow the river. Follow the sound. Follow the dog.

Just when I thought that there was no moving forward, at least without a machete, there appeared a narrow opening down to the river. I walked down, stood on the bank and looked to see none other than Black Lab. He had already swum to the other side, and was lying in some rushes, chin on paws, watching and no doubt thinking to himself, “Silly human. Afraid to get in the water because he’ll get his jeans wet.” He was right; getting in and getting wet was the perfect solution. When you’ve been moving through some 3500 acres of undeveloped Ozark forest, a river is like a royal highway.

I waded in and we walked as far as our feet could touch. When it came to the last big swim across, he gave me the first look of concern I had seen in his gentle face. But after some reassurance, he came to me and we were swimming neck and neck. In no time we landed on the far shore and indulged in the obligatory wet dog shake. The dirt road led to the gravel road which led to the blacktop and then the long walk back up to the monastery entrance.

When the two wet creatures appeared on the guest house steps, Sister Ann Marie was the first to see us. “What in the world happened to you two?” Black Lab and I looked at each other and, almost in unison, said, “Stations of the Cross.”

“Yes,” said the sister, “you never really know what might happen when you walk the Stations of the Cross.”

(Tim Carson, June 29, 2010)