One summer I took an intensive intermediate Spanish class at a college administered by a group of Benedictine monks. We met for several hours each day and spent time outside of class in a language lab. One day, when I arrived for class, I found it had been cancelled -- professor taken ill. (Or perhaps, it being an unsubtly beautiful day in June, he had found that el día, being so muy bonito, simply could not be spent in halting conversación while sitting in a bare classroom stuck in an out-of-the-way niche in the administration building. Smart man in any language.) Suddenly the day handed me back two hours liberated from the burden of appointment. I spent a little time at the library going through periodicals I never get a chance to see and then walked over to the chapel.
Being a person of no religious faith never stops me from visiting churches. I like churches because they are one of the few, and may be the only, places where a person can find quiet in unstinting abundance. Not just a quiet that equals the absence of noise, a deficit, but a quiet that soaks into a person's being, the way oxygen floods the lung's alveoli and fans out into the blood. Corporeal quiet. Succulent quiet.
I sat myself in one of the pews -- and just sat, the only person there. I didn't bother to think or muse, didn't bother to figure out or plan -- I just sat in the comfortable silence resident in that vaulted and dusky space.
It was an odd experience to be quiet, to be just quiet and nothing else. For one thing, I could hear myself breathe. Have you heard yourself breathe lately? Have you felt yourself breathe lately? A splendid soothing action, this gentle bellows, this lithe accordion. To hear the precise inhale, the languorous exhale, to feel the ribs pulse, the shoulders lift and fall, to know the articulate rhythm of a body breathing full and even, its solid thereness, its unequivocal isness, breached that thick waxy layer of everyday that coated my senses, and I breathed as if I breathed for the first time, scraped clean and made conscious of what I had taken for granted. The wonders of the world lie in such unplanned quiet eruptions of notice.
So I sat and breathed in the moment, inspired, in a delicate aside from time. Four nuns came in for prayer, three in white, one in black; two janitors came through kicking up the kneelers left down from that morning's mass. Occasionally there were creaks and crinches from the building itself -- as if it breathed as well, using air borrowed from whispered responses or susurrations of faith. I wanted to stay suspended in that timelessness forever, in the comfort of not being driven or destined. At that moment, I could well understand why someone would want to commit a life to faith, if "faith" meant just such a state of silent calm and satisfaction with stillness.
As a boy growing up Catholic, the church steeped me in the possibilities of vocation: the priest occasionally visiting the classrooms to speak about "making God's choice"; the young-boy piety of serving Mass, intoning Latin with bad accent and bare comprehension; the rinsed feeling of confession, muttering contrition at the altar rail while others waited, kneeling, in the sibilant quiet -- all this and more placed the spirit into a state of waiting for the word, the sign, the call. I remember wondering how the call would come: a blinding flash of revelation, a whisper in the inner ear, a just-knowing that would pervade the mind. I remember thinking once that it had visited me. For some reason, in the eighth grade, when the priests and nuns seemed to be working on us with special diligence, I got the notion in my head that I wanted to enter the Trappist order. I wouldn't just become an ordinary priest, like the dandruff-flecked weak-chinned men who haunted the rectory; I would distance myself into silence and meditation, seek a farther border and more strenuous faith.
I can't recall how I learned about the Trappists -- I don't think they distributed recruitment brochures. I only know that what I understood their lives to be, with its blend of silent prayer and active self-sufficiency, seemed to complete something unfinished and green in me, something that would not be satisfied by the more worldly approaches of the Benedictines or the Franciscans or the daily rounds of a parish priest. I never did enter the order -- by the time I could have chosen, the worldly world attracted me too much. But I never lost that unfinished part nor that urge for completion that incompletion provoked, and for the brief duration of sitting in the chapel, I could experience what I thought a faith bone-deep would bring: the sacrament of calm, deliberate breathing, the outward sign of the inward grace of fitting with the world.
But, as with everything, the moment passed, and soon the time came to go back to the indenture of the world, out to its dice and splendor.
These kinds of pauses always tempt me to wring something useful out of them, to employ them to establish answers and truths and antidotes, above all, rules by which to live. Temperamentally, I have a hard time accepting that not-doing something can be valuable. But I am also smart enough, or perhaps it's ignorant enough, to suspect that there is just breathing, and that breathing may be the only truth we have because when it stops, truth stops as well. We can breathe full, we can breathe shallow, we can modulate it or ignore it -- but we can't avoid it. Which means that we need to figure out what makes us breathe the best, what floods our being with oxygen and insight, and then breathe as if our lives depended on it, filling ourselves with combustion and light before the inevitable declension of darkness parses us into absence. Breathe on, Macduff!
An addendum: I passed the Spanish class.
(October 1995)