Morning Rounds and Evening Musings

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass.
The one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
~Mary Oliver

My spiritual director gave me this poem on Friday. I usually hate poetry, but I LOVE this one. There were so many points of identification for me. "I do not know how to pray..." Amen, sister! And what if prayer IS paying attention? Listening for God, noticing where God shows up, looking for God's hand all around us--in the complicated eye of a grasshopper, even. I hope I can learn to pay attention. A huge piece of this whole discernment process will be learning to do just that--to notice how I feel doing certain things, to listen to my gut. Sounds so easy as I write this, but I have a terrible time listening to anything but the mind games and rationalization that swirl around in my head.

Also, I spend way too much time listening to the voices around me. I was leaning toward not being a priest before I got the 'yes' from my discernment committee. Then, when I read that 'yes' at the bottom of the page, I suddenly felt like I could really, truly consider the priesthood for the very first time. Perhaps all my negativity and the reason upon reason I piled up in my head trying to talk myself out of the priesthood were all just a smoke screen, a vain attempt to protect myself from possible rejection. Now the door is wide open, and the choice really is mine.

I desperately want to fall in the grass. And I have this vision of me standing in a field and falling straight down, arms outstretched. And as I fall, everyone else--the discernment committee, my friends and parents, Pat and Dan (my supervisors at St. Luke's)--everyone else stays above me. And their opinions and advice stay up there with them, and I am left to fall. All alone I fall in the grass and then, I can truly know what I think about being a priest. The layers of resistance, and the layers of opinions and recommendations are stripped away leaving me with my own, more important, gut feeling about being a priest. That is my hope.

It doesn't feel like it should be this hard to know the answer to the question, "What do you want?" Knowing that I can serve God in whatever I do, that God's will is that I belong to him in whatever capacity I work, what do I want? But for some unknown reason, this question feels impossible right now. Some days I think "just go for it!" And others I feel so clearly that it would be a huge mistake. But I am learning to pay attention.