Summertime

The Monastery closed on July 24 for our annual retreat. It sounds selfish, but I always look forward to the quiet of a house without guests. I love the guests, mostly, but as I get older, I realize I also love quiet and being alone. Strange for a monk, I know. So this year the community had eight days of silence instead of our customary 10. We are going to try a new retreat formula. In the past few years we have joined our monthly retreats into quarterly retreats, so instead of having one silent day each month, we have three or four a quarter. That won't change, but what will is that we are shortening the annual community all-together retreat slightly and then each monk will have another eight days sometime in the other end of the year. For a guy who likes to be alone and quiet this will be wonderful, I think.

As I have for some years now, I spent a couple of weeks in August after the community retreat staying at the House of the Redeemer in New York City. I like to do this partly to catch up on how things are going at the House, where I have been on the Board of Trustees for eight years or more now. It also reconnects me to the City, which I love.

I always enter into that time full of intentions -- you can see my reading list in the previous post. I usually stock my head full of museums and shows and music and other things NYC offers, and then, like my reading list, something else happens. This time two things happened. The first was friends. A couple who had been guests at the Monastery found me on Facebook and suggested we get together. So we had dinner together at a nice place downtown, where they shared an enormous lobster, and we got to know each other better. And then we thought, what fun it would be to go somewhere in the City together. We thought about the Scholars' Garden on Staten Island, but we had all been there already. A place I had not been, however, was the Bronx Zoo.

So, plans made, they picked me up 10-ish on the appointed morning. Brave souls that they are, they keep a car in NYC (they live in Astoria, Queens, where such things are possible) and we started our drive. The short stretch up the Major Deegan, which looked so convenient on the map, turned into a hour or more of creeping traffic. It was for all of us a spiritual exercise in patience. We finally debouched onto the Cross Bronx Expressway, which going east was practically empty. We reached the Zoo, paid for parking, paid for tickets, and entered. I loved it all. The tigers were spectacular, even with half a hundred yammering kids from a Brooklyn Christian summer school. I won't do a full-scale review of the zoo, except to say that if you go, you should definitely bring money. But best of all was spending time together with friends.

On Saturday the 13th another friend and I had lunch at the southern end of the High Line, just below 14th Street, and then walked to its northern terminus at 30th Street or so. It was a view of New York I had never seen, and is so interestingly designed that what could be just a straight path is in fact a wonderful amalgam of creative landscaping and space that is quite charming. I fully intended to go to church the next day, but that was a day of terrific storm, with sheets of rain pounding down for hours in the morning.

The other thing that happened was that not much happened at all. The rest of my time turned out pretty much as it always does. My always-enjoyable time with the wonderful staff at the House of the Redeemer. Some quality time with Carl Sword, OHC, who lives in NYC. A couple of lunches and dinners with other friends. A couple of movies -- Cowboys and Aliens and the ape movie -- and a show -- The Master Class (terrific). And the rest of the time was spent basically alone.

Which I am gradually realizing is something I did a lot of when I was a monk not in residence and which, ironically I suppose, I miss now that I am back at the Monastery. Unstructured, quiet time, some of it for reading, some of it for praying, but much of it just for being. Walking is a big part of it.

I love being with friends and seeing new and beautiful things. But also -- I love being quiet and I love being alone. Strange, no?

I'll be back in NYC this weekend, presiding and preaching at The Church of the Incarnation, at Madison and 35th, 8:30 and 11:00. The Rector, Doug Ousley, will be away at the wedding of one of his sons.