Most of my life – – all of my life so far, actually – – I have been – – am – – painfully and exceedingly shy. As an introverted feeling intuitive perceiver, my inner place occupies so much of my attention that I often miss concrete facts and details. To extroverted, sensate colleagues and friends, I am sometimes the proverbial sand in the gears of progress, appearing to come from East God- knows-where. Sometimes, a place that I may have experienced only momentarily Later grows in my imagination and memory until it becomes quite significant, the remembered place becoming a vital part of my interior landscape. When I was 13 or so, I had gotten a scholarship to go to summer day camp. On the last day, when everyone had gone up to the gate of the camp, I went back for a few moments to a place where, in activity filled days, I could count on finding a few moments of solitude. I remember the texture of the grass, fine and spring green, in contrast to the dark green of the weeds and undergrowth that lay all around the little clearing. There was an immense old oak at the edge, with strong, overarching branches that reached across and high above the circle, providing both shelter from the rain and shaded sunlight and cooling gentle breezes on hot summer days. 70 years later, the feeling of that cloister still stays with me, and when, a few years ago, a workshop leader asked us to think about what kind of tree we were, I knew immediately that I was that oak. Around the same time, A friend, a worker in clay, gave me a tiny amulet, embossed with an oak with deep strong roots and sheltering branches.
Somewhat Less benign at times but equally important in my life has been church-as-place. In the Catholic Church culture when I was growing up, one never passed a church without making “a visit,” or at least making the sign of the cross. I was startled when one of the Super Bowl ads featured a similar vignette. I still do that, although most churches are locked these days. When I was in junior and senior high school, most school events took place during the school day, and so a school dance might occur during a Friday afternoon. I remember one of those dances so clearly. My mother had made a blue tiered bouffant skirt with dark blue ribbon at the seams. I had white bobby socks and a white blouse. Looking back, I probably looked like all the other girls, but I was so afraid and felt so ugly that I escaped to the church next door, where I spent most of the afternoon.
That day, the church was a refuge, and I’m sure that my very young decision to enter a convent hinged on my need for a safe refuge as well. The “chapel” at the motherhouse was the size of a small Cathedral. The altar was a replica of the Michelangelo baldachino at St. Peter’s in Rome. The chapel had exposition of the Eucharist every day, and the monstrance was a large gold sun-shaped repository with the host in a small glass container at the center. I read somewhere years ago that a monstrance is a kind of mandala, a maze which occupies one’s vision and surface attention while one does inner work, like prayer, unimpeded by one’s conscious thoughts. That’s true. I could have spent hours and hours in that chapel, and did, since we spent five or six hours each weekday with mass, the Divine office, sacred reading and other kinds of prayer. Given the monastic culture and discipline of the 50s, (read Sr. Helen Prejean’s autobiography) I badly needed a safe refuge of some kind, somewhere.
The gift, the grace, to me in both of those images is that even now, I can recall each place in an instant with all their quiet sweetness. They still serve me well.