In the parochial model, the desire for deep life is addressed by “Stewardship Campaigns” and “Stewardship Campaigns” encourage people to give of their “Time, Talent and Treasure.” Willing volunteers sit on a number of committees, run a series of events. The problem is, from the Altar and Rosary Society to the Knights of Columbus Pancake breakfast, event running committees fall short of addressing the need for Transformation. I suppose that’s why I left the parish structure for the monastic one. In any case, it led me to evolve a different model.
First, art became my inner life. Morning by morning, in the monastery, I would rise at 1:30 for coffee and an hour of uninterrupted writing time. It began as a purely creative effort, and deepened into prayer over time.
I came to see it as a process similar to the prophets. Elijah, for instance, fled Queen Jezebel, and hid in a cave, objecting that he the only prophet of the true God still alive, and the queen wanted him dead. By and by, through fires and storms, Elijah was drawn away from his concerns and outside of himself, to a point of quiet. Then the Lord would reveal to him what he was to do. God asked Jeremiah “What do you see?” and when Jeremiah replied “I see a boiling pot, tipping toward us from the north,” God revealed the coming of the Babylonian army.
My process was similar. I’d take note of what I’m preoccupied by, then slowly turn my attention to my surroundings. For some reason, that turn was always heavy with inspiration. Words and images would coalesce and begin falling into metered, rhymed patterns. Poems happened routinely, and became a vehicle for self examination.
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| Photo: Copyright Tumelo Khoza, as always. |
Both happened at the behest—at best, at least—of a power greater than myself. While serving as a Catholic Worker at Phoenix’s Andre House of Hospitality, I was overwhelmed by the constant need of those we served. Even back then, poetry and prayer were the way I came to know my inner life. I remember writing a poem, that stands out as my life’s first example of divine action through art. The poem went something like “I’m yours, God, when I awake to needs I can’t answer./ I’m yours when the soup runs low./ I am yours when I turn Christ’s brother bums away for begging a third blanket this month./ Help me to remember that they all are yours as well.”
Looking back, I see the poem simultaneously as disgustingly pious and an honest statement of emotion. On a whim I published it in the Homeless Shelter’s newsletter. Unexpectedly, a week later, one of the shelter’s benefactors pulled up with a truckload of sleeping bags. Having read and been affected by the poem, he’d decided to buy all the sleeping bags in the phoenix area and donate them. He was kind enough to credit my writing with inspiring his generosity. I struggled, and still do, to get out of the way, to focus on God’s inspiration and the benefactor’s generosity.
After I’d joined the monastery and during a time of struggle, I wrote another poem. It was set in the past-tense context of the Phoenix Homeless Shelter, but it’s last lines definitely voiced a resolution to my present-tense monk problems. I quote it here in full:
By month’s end, everybody’s welfare checks
are as spent as my patience and the lines
are far longer than my attention span.
If our shelter runs out of food
and we have to close the soup line early,
most people walk away swearing under their breath.
are as spent as my patience and the lines
are far longer than my attention span.
If our shelter runs out of food
and we have to close the soup line early,
most people walk away swearing under their breath.
When it happened on March 31st, there were few exceptions.
As for Willie, his typical slight smile
persisted as we turned him away.
All he said was “good night” and “peace” to us.
Then, wiping his nose on his sleeve,
he headed for our building’s south wall and the well lit,
“Loitering Prohibited” sign beneath which we let him set up
his cardboard and sleeping bag.
That night someone stabbed Willie twice
for the new pair of shoes we’d just given him.
But not even death could change his facial expression.
The next morning, I was glad, as always, to see him lying there, smiling---
for the new pair of shoes we’d just given him.
But not even death could change his facial expression.
The next morning, I was glad, as always, to see him lying there, smiling---
not till I was within ten feet did I see his blood puddling under him.
After work I wept for an hour before sleeping.
All my tears left the pillowcase wet with a single doubt:
“How,” they asked, “can you keep doing this?”
But I know from when I crouched to check Willie’s pulse
that any question I kneel in
is an answer.
All my tears left the pillowcase wet with a single doubt:
“How,” they asked, “can you keep doing this?”
But I know from when I crouched to check Willie’s pulse
that any question I kneel in
is an answer.
This poem was published in volume 26 of Weavings Magazine, a spirituality journal with decent readership. At the time, their pay was the most money my art had ever earned, and the ego strokes implicit in exposure were nice. So I walked around on cloud nine. Then the check came, and I did what was customary in the monastery. I signed the check over to the brothers, and I went on with my life.
Some time later, a man arrived at the monastery from South Dakota, intent on allowing himself a silent retreat. After several days there, he pulled me aside. He said he’d crossed six states for two reasons: first, to thank me for my poem. He said he was director of a palliative care facility. He said, upon reading my poem, that he’d called his staff together and read it to them aloud. He said the whole room was silent, and several people were tearing up. He’d come to Mepkin, he said, because he wanted to know what I knew. I had no idea what I knew, but I wished him well in finding it.
At the Homeless Shelter and afterwards, I was learning that when I face my vulnerability, God acts.
After leaving the monastery, I made a friend, a performance poet from Durban, South Africa. Her name was Tumelo. We were united by a thirst for things beyond ourselves, by the positive ways Catholic Institutions had formed us, and ultimately by the burnout of failed belief. So art was our spiritual practice, but, with her, I could dip freely into religious themes.
I explained my art to her this way. “Poetry is like Moses’ burning bush. The burning bush is the inner tension and longing I don’t have a name for yet. If I just watch it, eventually a poem happens, and that poem is my inner life revealing its name. You know, in ACA, I learned that a miracle is when God does for you something you cannot do for yourself. For addicts, sobriety is a miracle, something God given that they tried and failed at. Tumelo, I’m not a quiet man: it’s really loud in my head. When I read a poem, if I’ve really connected with my audience there’s a moment of silence before they react. To me, that’s God giving something I don’t have.”
Tumelo and I would meet, read poems, drink wine and eat bacon. To this day it’s still our periodic ritual. We’ve talked about old romances, we’ve talked about new ones. We’ve gossiped about the Chicago art scene. We even had a sword fight once, when too-much-wine made us decide my samurai swords were not just for decoration.
Tumelo gave me a writing assignment once. She said “write a poem about the human experience as spirit.” Because she had bought me bacon, I didn’t balk at the assignment, but my relationship to the transcendent was fairly unhealthy at that point. All I knew was that I walked around tense all day. None of my “requests for God’s help” remedied it, and I’d long since ceased to ask.
Knowing I needed to write a poem about spirituality, morning by morning I sat with the tension. Then, on a random Tuesday, locking my car to head in for the teaching day, I had a solitary, peaceful thought. Since then, it’s become the authoritative view of my inner conflict. “Don’t worry,” I heard myself think. “Your anxieties are just baby poems.”
Driving home that day, I had the insight that led to “doing my homework.” On its completion, Tumelo and I met at an Indian Restaurant. My friend could be counted on to speak isiZulu when she felt things strongly, exclaiming things like “Aybo” when she was surprised. If she felt things really strongly—mostly when she was mad—she would switch exclusively to her mother-tongue. IsiZulu is Tumelo’s way of communicating seriousness.
That night we did all the small talk and we drank all the wine. Eventually she wouldn’t allow me to delay any longer. She asked “Have you done your assignment?” She asked.
“I have,” I said, “First, let me just say that the human experience of spirit is that we have a voice, but we lose our voice before we use our voice. That was my experience of writing this poem.”
“Eish, Josh, that’s deep,” she said, pulling out the isiZulu. “I can’t wait to hear it.”
Then I read the poem:
what skylines and roads show
is distance to speaking from hesitance.
Poetry's reticence rhymed with my fear
that my healing’s impossible, deals are all sealed
and that, baby, the bathwater’s tossable.
Whispering's soft and my thinking is hounded.
It stinks how I’ve found that I’m often surrounded
by hoarseness and rough; see no city's enough, y’all
to comfort or calm me. My throat is too raw
with the fucks, prayers and psalms
that I give but can’t hear over trucks trains and cars.
Folks my mouth is a scar;
a reminder in skin of what words really are:
the city's best gift. But it won’t yield its verse
without taking my strained voice and breaking it first.
Tumelo’s head was hung. Her reaction was full: first, silence spoke, then her mother-tongue. It was an honor, and it reinforced how transcendent, and what a gift our bond was.
I tell the story to highlight a theme: for me, at its best, ministry’s just resonance. This is why signing up for the parish bake sale at the stewardship drive’s never done it for me. Over time I’ve learned to choose the words that label my inner tensions, and when I say them, folks who feel similarly find me. For me, art is just angst introducing itself. But the real gift comes from God. I don’t know if its always true, when christ said “whenever two or more are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” I’ve been to some stuffy parish committee meetings. Even thought it’s never more than fleeting, I know how a room feels when common emotion unites it. I’ve had indian food with poets who know my life from the inside out. If there are candidates for spiritual experience, that’s certainly one of them.
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