Green eggs & ham & God - Catholic convert

Commonweal, Feb 14, 1997 by Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill

Not long ago I stayed a weekend at the Abbey of Gethsemani, the better part of my time there spent praying quietly with the monks in their grand, austere church. During my brief sojourn, I was able to drink in the deep, unremembered pleasures of solitude - to think about the meaning of the psalms I chanted, to sit in silence in the darkened church after everyone else had left, to make my solitary way across the abbey's fields on a bracing fall afternoon.

The Sunday after my return, my husband and I grabbed some of the last seats at the 9 A.M. Family Mass at our parish church in a Connecticut suburb. With our three small children, we squeezed between a humorless elderly woman and a middle-aged couple who glanced over at us whenever one of the children's voices became too loud. Instead of intoning the psalms with Trappist monks, I juggled hymnal, diaper bag, winter coats, and my youngest child, who is ten months old. I managed to catch the gist of the first two readings, but was distracted from the Gospel because I had to stop my three-year-old son from plummeting into the pew ahead. I missed the Creed entirely as I stepped over bony, unsmiling knees to take my four-year-old daughter to Sunday school. The baby needed his bottle during the prayer of consecration, and our pew was so crowded that, after Communion, I had no place to kneel in thanks.

For a layperson like me, who finds her contemplative inclinations submerged in a busy family life, it's much easier to find spirituality in a monastery. The minute I stepped into the abbey's guest house, I sensed the fullness of the presence of God - in the silence, in spontaneous conversations with other guests, in the icons, in the light and the darkness, even in a glorious tangle of branches I saw during a walk. In our parish church, that kind of sacredness is harder to come by - so many announcements, the sheepish sincerity of the kiss of peace, the sweetly off-key children's choir. In contrast to the prosaic occupants of our suburban pews - stout married couples, shuffling teen-agers, old people dangling rosaries from age-spotted hands - the white-robed monks in the abbey's choir seemed mysterious, even heroic in their radical choice to seek union with God. The monks' cadences resonated beautifully against the white, concrete walls of their church.

The tension between the contemplative quiet I crave and the active tempo I must keep has been the central fact in my spiritual life since I converted to Catholicism a year-and-a-half ago. The day of my confirmation augured my predicament precisely: I went from a hushed, joyful Easter Mass at the Carmelite nuns' monastery where I was received into the church straight home to hunt Easter eggs with the children and to cook a leg of lamb for dinner. For some time after I became Catholic, this conflict gnawed at me, until I recalled one of the most important precepts I had learned on my journey into the church: to strive in all things to discern and to obey the will of God.

For whatever reason, I realized that the still, small voice that I long to hear is these days mediated through the un-still, small voices of my babbling brood. Being a human, and an overachieving one, I would have preferred to serve God through extraordinary measures, not the mundanities of changing diapers, reading Green Eggs and Ham, and baking cookies with my children.

But here is where I am, in the hurly-burly of a young family and a suburban parish. And what is more important, here is where God is too. I believe that there is as much love and faith and hope in this ordinary Mass in Ordinary Time as in the extraordinary beauty of terce or compline at the abbey. Although my fellow parishioners don't look heroic, they surely carry within themselves elements of the sacred. Perhaps the middle-aged couple next to us have had their faith tried by the death of a child, and Ms. Bony Knees spent her life caring for a disabled child.

The Holy Spirit may not be so readily apparent or deeply felt here as in the monks' austere church, but we belong together with the monks in a communion of seeking. Maybe this is what the sacred mysteries really mean. And maybe the next time I am up with the baby at 3:15 in the morning, I'll regard it as my version of Gethsemani's vigils, as another form of praise for God.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill is the coauthor, with Joseph Papp, of Shakespeare Alive! (Bantam, 1988). She has worked at Shakespeare-in-the-Park and as head of public affairs for the New York Public Library.