Reading Mother Teresa--Ritual

May these words of my mouth 

and this meditation of my heart 

be pleasing in your sight, Lord, 

my Rock and my Redeemer. Psalm 19:14

The other day I can’t tell you how bad I felt. – There was a moment when I nearly refused to accept. – Deliberately I took the Rosary and very slowly without even meditating or thinking – I said it slowly and calmly. The moment passed. . . . (238, Letter to Bishop Picachy)

I was 32 years old when someone at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference called to tell me that my application for a scholarship had been accepted and they were offering me a position as a waiter. I had no idea what that meant, but I understood proudly that the offer was a good, good thing.

It’s now more another 32 years later, but I will never forget receiving that call because I felt that my being chosen for a scholarship to the granddaddy of all writers conferences, Bread Loaf, signaled fame and fortune.

When I flew into Burlington, Vermont, for the conference, I met another conferee, a woman my age, married with two children, an aspiring poet. Ten days later, when we boarded a plane to leave, she and I stood on the stairway to a small jet, waiting to enter the cabin. She looked at me and shook her head. “I hope this plane crashes,” she told me.

The atmosphere during that mountaintop retreat had been electric. Aspiring writers like me flirted daily with National Book Award winners, editors, agents, and publishers. Life – dawn ‘till dawn – was always on stage. She’d been wooed by a celebrity poet, and she’d fallen in every way. Now, regrettably, she had to go back to real life.

I’ll admit it – I wasn’t accustomed to either the pace or the character of life at Bread Loaf.

On a Sunday morning, I had walked away from people to a weathered Adirondack chair in a broad meadow, where I sat for an hour, feeling blessed sustenance simply from thinking deeply about my little son’s soft arm, trying to imagine what his hand would feel like in mine, all the while reciting the familiar words of the 23rd psalm.

That moment is likely the closest I ever came to meditation, and I’ll never forget it.

When the Rosary was recited over the radio when I was a boy, my parents raised an eyebrow, rolled their eyes, and turned it off – “vain repetition,” we were always told, quoting the gospel’s admonition against such tomfoolery. I never thought of the Rosary as anything else.

But when I think of Mother Teresa’s besieged soul, when I see her sitting in silence, her fingers on each separate bead while repeating those prayers over and over again, I don’t think of all those repetitions as being in any way, shape, or form, vain.

When our ritual is empty, it isn’t ritual at all. But when it’s earnest as it was at least one day in the life of Mother Teresa, when it’s undertaken in passionate desire for peace and joy, then it is, in a way even a Calvinist might acknowledge, sacramental.

That weathered Adirondack chair sits in a defined place in my soul’s memory, I swear. As does Mother Teresa, stooping, praying, meditating, beads in hand, in an impassioned ritual I may likely never share, in nearly faithless hope of a spiritual blessing, even if only for a day, peace to quell the heavy burden of her doubt.