Constant prayer and charity towards others — these are the “November” gifts from God
It’s a foggy morning in Combermere as I write this article for the November Restoration. The grass is soaked to the roots with morning dew, so common in the last part of summer and the beginning of autumn in the countryside here.
At this writing, the activities of summer are giving way to those of autumn, and unlike places where activity is revving up once again (schools, work, etc.), here at Madonna House, there is a quieting down somewhat. If any month of the year could be called “quiet” here, November would probably be that month.
Other times of the year can sort of entice us to find life outside of ourselves. One thinks of spring, with the return of signs of new life all around, or summer, with promise of vacation and fishing or whatever one enjoys in the great outdoors. Even winter, with Christmas near the beginning with its festal food and exchange of gifts in many places, has its moments of joyful celebration and snow shining brightly in the light of sun or moon.
But November? She is an almost sullen, very serious kind of taskmaster. Even if we attempt to brighten it up some by early displays of Christmas lights and such, there is a tangible heaviness in the air, without benefit of abundance of flowers or brilliance of autumn leaves to relieve the monotony.
Monotony. That’s one word to describe it. Or monotone. That would also do. Maybe monochrome also.
While in our world today one can always fill the air with broadcasts of one kind or another, there is a kind of dead stillness that invites our attention just beyond the range of all our noise and activity designed to avoid it. It is the stillness of Helplessness. Limitation. End of control. Sickness. Loneliness. The Grave.
All of this awaits us in November’s quiet embrace, if we dare to enter into it. There is a treasure to be discovered in the very heart of all this gloom. A treasure that can sustain us in our journey towards the dawn of eternity.
In Madonna House, we call this stillness by various names that Catherine Doherty passed on to us from her Russian spiritual inheritance: Poustinia of the heart. Molchanie (the word for silence in Russian). Hesychasm — a Greek word meaning stillness — is also occasionally heard but is less familiar to most of us.
I like to stick with the first of these terms, poustinia of the heart. This is a phrase that refers to a certain state of the soul where one is living constantly in the presence of the Lord.
For this to be possible, it is necessary to have reached a certain level of quiet inside one’s heart so that every moment, every situation, is held before the Lord with the trust of a child. Confidently, one awaits what the Lord desires to reveal about this situation or that, this decision or that.
Catherine Doherty put it this way in her book, Poustinia:
“Within my heart, within me, I am or should be constantly in the presence of God. This is another way of saying that I live in a garden enclosed where I walk and talk with God (though a Russian would say ‘where all in me is silent and where I am immersed in the silence of God’).
“The poustinia (the word itself means desert) is within, and one is forever immersed in the silence of God, forever listening to the word of God, forever repeating it to others in word and deed.” (pp. 184-185, 3rd edition, 2000)
It is important to note that Catherine’s concept of poustinia of the heart is not a distancing oneself from others but a plunging into the lives and trials of my fellow human beings by means of an ever-deepening immersion in the Blessed Trinity: “My life of service and love to my fellow man is simply the echo of this silence and solitude. Inwardly, I identify myself with God and with humanity.” (Ibid.)
This is the beautiful fruit of the long journey into interior silence. The path to that state of being is not an easy one because all that is dead in us — dead to God, that is — must be exposed for what it is, repented of, transformed by the grace of God from mute resistance to welcoming arms and an open heart.
It is at this very point that the testing of November, the literal one or a symbolic one, can be applied to our souls. Dead leaves, dead flowers, dead projects once holding so much promise, dead plans, dead relationships, dead hopes…all of these speak to something so deep in us. Unless the Lord raises us up, and only he can, we remain fruitless, useless.
And though our faith tells us with certainty that God does raise us up, in the midst of November’s greyness and fog and quiet, it may not be obvious when or how or if this is to take place.
This is where faith must take over, and we are called to just do it: pray, cry out to God, take time to do this, fall down and worship, be still, listen, and then cry out again. Repeat.
But there is also another path to reach this place of Presence within and that is to reach out to a fellow human being. This is simply another way of touching the Lord, who abides most especially in the poor and the lost. You may be asked to do no more than to perform a simple human gesture of everyday kindness. But this plunges you into the emptying of Christ himself on our behalf, as he reached down to raise us up to be one with him.
Constant prayer and charity towards others — these are the “November” gifts from God that bring us through death to self and bestow upon us the gift of life eternal.
Meanwhile, November remains true to character, and the autumn rains are mixed with a bit of wet snow and dark days that invite us to “go inside” and reflect upon the mystery of the gift of life hidden within the shadows of a dark November afternoon.
[photo: Madawaska River by Josh Trefney]
