Conversatio Light by Light

Another Ordinary Day in Exile

It's Wednesday morning and I'm realizing what a sorry excuse for a Benedictine I've become. I've looked in that flowered cardboard box under the bed, on the cherrywood bookshelf, in the not-so-neat bedside drawer, and I can't put hands on my soft-cover, red Rule of Benedict. I thought it was right...there. Didn't I just have it just a few...months ago?

Fortunately, I recently unpacked some of my devotional books, and although I haven't read them in (well, we don't really have to say how long, do we?), the covers still look familar. So it's come to this, a kind of public confession. I'm not only a Benedictine in exile, but once again I've wandered away from the disciplines that once comforted and formed and convicted me. Daily. Hourly. Not that I was ever a strict sort of person. But I had a framework of prayer and devotion in my life.

What happened? Ordinary stuff wore me down. Grad school and migraines. Marital problems and moving. Hospitalizations and a divorce. Trying to graduate and find a job. The horror of middle age dating. I didn't lose myself, and I'm not going to claim that I "lost God," because God is entirely too faithful to put up with that sort of nonsense from me.

I'm not going to claim that I "lost God," because God is entirely too faithful to put up with that sort of nonsense from me.

It would also be an insult to this blog and to your intelligence to overdramatize my state with some sort of "one day I was in darkness and the next day I was in light," or vice versa, paradigm of conversion. Surely these things happen; they've even happened to me--I only wish the light had been brighter when I did. These dramatic "conversions" can happen to peddlers and pimps, Benedictines and Baptists and even Catholics and Lutherans (oh, I tease, but with love as only a survivor can).

However, I believe that this is not what conversatio is about.

If only it were, I think it would be easier. I'd like to wake up one day with all of the lights streaming on my heart. I think, though, that conversatio may be more like this...like going to bed with a single nightlight on and being glad in the wee morning hours to find that it hasn't burned out--then to see that God, in His infinite mercy, has brought another sunrise to warm my bedroom.

Then, that the stove light works when I can't quite see if my eggs are done.

And the table lamp works when I want to read.

Light by light, God gives me what I need to see my progress through the day. Then, God gives me the grace to navigate through the furniture and choices until the sun sets and I'm alone with my nightlight again.

So what happened that I lost my Rule and my rhythm of Benedictine reading and prayer? I'm not sure, but I know when it happened. Sometime between the move away from the abbey and the trips to the hospital, around the time of the divorce and the feeling unfit to be around other spiritual people. I stopped reaching out to other Benedictine oblates and asking for their prayers. I still read the oblate newsletter, but felt like it was from another time, another place, too far for me to reach.

So honestly, it's no excuse, but I believe that the very nature of conversatio is why I keep misplacing my Rule of Benedict, now that I'm alone.

Those lights of conversion are so dim, and I'm fumbling around here all by myself.

I think that's why most Benedictines try very hard not to live alone, or at least try to get out and pray with others now and then. You need someone to reach over and hand you your prayer book, sometimes, or to nudge you when you doze off, so early in the morning, or at Evening Prayer.

Is anybody out there?