Wow, that was fun, the Fall Fundraiser! I tried to thank every contributor individually–if not, forgive me, and let me here express my profound gratitude.

What’s interesting is how many names I didn’t recognize, and how many people said that they’d never left a comment but have been reading me and appreciating the work for years.

So that was gratifying–and reminds me that when the dust settles and all is said and done–I have always just wanted to make enough money to support my writing. My first love, my deepest desire, is always simply to write…whatever moves me on any particular day.

To that end, I want to share this piece that I began several weeks ago while in Europe and that has a couple of lines that make me laugh and that I therefore can’t resist putting out there.

Also it kind of sums up what’s been going on in my head and heart.

Perhaps on some level you can relate.

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LET’S BE UNEXTINGUISHED SOULS!

“The dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace” [Luke 1:78-79].

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I watched dawn break this morning, from my window at a religious house on the coast of Ireland.

With seven others, I’m on a week-long silent retreat. The first night we had dinner together, then gathered with our director, with whom we’ll meet separately once a day. We introduced ourselves with a maybe two-minute bio, then went in to Adoration.

In silence you develop a deep affection for your fellows. Tuesday Sr. Muireann passed me the brown bread in the tenderest way and then whispered Did I want butter?

The next morning Fr. Seamus, from County Kerry, crept over, held a tiny packet of preserves aloft over the middle of the table, and whispered: “I found an orange marmalade! Does anyone want it?”

In silence, such seemingly small gestures are like benedictions.

Meanwhile this afternoon I walked along the coast and down the hill to the secret though not-so-secret beach where a couple of small groups of laughing Irish people had doffed their clothes and were swimming in suits and trunks, gamboling about, the pudgy torsos of the men proud and shining.

Usually, I am all for silence, all the time, and would have scrupulously observed it–especially during a retreat built around silence!

But for whatever reason, I was edgy. The leaf blower guys had come every day, fouling the quiet with their infernal machines.

But my unrest went deeper than leaf blowers. A movement was afoot in my psyche that I couldn’t quite parse.

I made my way two-thirds the length of the beach, flopped on the sand in a semi-reclining position, and dialed my NYC friend Patrick on whatsapp. A professional actor, Pat is also a fastidious (way more fastidious than me) housekeeper.  

“Oh wow, hon,” I brayed, “you would die at this place! It’s like a turn-of-the-century—and I mean 20^th century—abandoned sanitarium. Mounds of dirty laundry in the hallway, overflowing wastebaskets in the bathroom. And the food is just awful! Like Dinty Moore beef stew with a mound of mashed potatoes. I haven’t seen a vegetable in days! Last night was chicken curry with rice AND flatbread. Two starches but…oh for something green! Or a bowl of raspberries”…

Patrick shuddered, not so much at the visual, no doubt, as at the realization that I was poised to spew my usual litany of daily minutiae and exaggerated-for-effect complaints.

“The worst thing is, I dragged my friend Raye here, and told her how great the FOOD was! Last year, it was! Lavish buffets of Irish yogurt, cheese, home-made preserves, lovely salads with fresh greens, eggs, thinly sliced ham (I remembered too late that Pat is vegan). I’ve been dying to text her to commiserate, and apologize, but we’re supposed to be in silence.”

“Aw I bet that’d be okay,” Pat ventured.

“I don’t know. Unlike me, she’s probably not trolling twitter and reading up on that lady from France whose husband drugged her and brought his friends in to rape her. She’s probably praying. She’s probably communing with God.”

The fact is I was communing with God, too. And I was pissed. After 30 years in LA, I’d moved mid-pandemic to the Arizona desert and now felt like those Israelites who, having been delivered from slavery in Egypt, whined to the Lord, “Eh, why did you bring us to this wasteland? At least back home we had melons and cucumber and leeks! The food here is horrible! The culture’s meh. Let’s have some bright lights, some energy, some LIFE!”

My ostensible demographic—the people who lived in over-55 trailer parks—to my shock simply weren’t that interested in me! I couldn’t get over it. For my own part, I wasn’t much moved to go out for fish tacos or Chinese (in Tucson?!), nor to plan trips to the Casino and discuss the best way to eliminate backyard ground squirrels.

I’d tried. The Lord knows I’d tried. I’d gone with my 12-step people on two day-long outings to Mount Lemmon, a local landmark that’s 9000 feet high and goes through five climate zones and is basically the only place you can go in summer to escape the blinding, baking, heat.

The first outing I’d left my phone in the car of the woman who’d given me a ride and realized I had no way of contacting her to ask—a ghastly 24-hour interlude. The second time I’d offered to drive and, en route, helpfully buzzed down the side window so my passenger wouldn’t roast to death. A sound like gravel being crushed ensued, the window became stuck fast, and the repair ended up costing seven hundred dollars.  

I constantly schlepped to Mass and, at the local campus ministry, had offered to give free talks on conversion, recovery from addiction, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the vocation of the artist, writing a weekly arts and culture for the Archdiocese of LA, food, nature, life—you tell me what you want me to speak on: I’ll come up with something!: not interested.

Instead, a priest there finally asked if I’d be willing to write announcements for the weekly bulletin and when I showed up at his behest to discuss what he wanted (anything to contribute; to feel I belonged!), ghosted me.

Everywhere I went, people gave me the once-over with that held-in, glazed-eye look that signifies the thought balloon, Where on God’s green earth did you get that OUTFIT?

“Haven’t you ever seen a garment by the German designer Rundholz?” I wanted to snap. “This shapeless, cement-gray hooded shroud, larded with zippers, would be considered stylish in Berlin. So would my Trippen sandals, modeled on the kind of stout footgear worn by Teutonic prison matrons.” 

“It is solved by walking,” said St. Augustine, but I’d started to ask: WHAT is solved?

Up and down the residential streets of my “historic neighborhood” I traipsed, the unfriendly dog owners allowing their hateful beasts to lunge and snarl; the faces of the passersby into which I hopefully peered uncomprehending and dead.

Interestingly, my spiritual director had picked up on my malaise right away. In fact, I hadn’t even known I had a malaise until I’d jokingly, or so I thought, observed in our first session, “Well I moved to the desert three years ago and it’s a bit more a desert than I bargained for!”

“Really?” she replied. “Tell me about it. Who, for example, are your friends there?”

I thought for a second, then bark-laughed. “Unh…Felicia and Johnny?”

Felicia and Johnny were a married couple young enough to be my children who I loved dearly and with whom I got together maybe once every three months.

“I think God wants us to be in a place, insofar as possible,” my director continued, “where we’re appreciated. Where people are interested and able to respond to us.”

“Oh!” I said. “He does?”

I realized I had come to think I was offering myself up to be immolated in the desert! To die once and for all to my ego! To pray for the world in solitude! To follow in the footsteps of Charles de Foucauld!

If I was lonely (and sad, and restless), as St. Paul had observed: “Here we have no lasting city, we seek a home that is yet to come.”

How lucky could a person be? I asked myself often: in good health, following my vocation, seeking. If anything was wrong, the wrongness was certainly in me, not in the place I lived (nor, obviously, in the place where I was on retreat).

Tons of people in the desert had been absolutely lovely and welcoming. Tons of good, iinteresting people had made their own homes and lives there for decades. Still…

In Cry of the Heart: On the Meaning of Suffering, the late Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete wrote that the most important aspect of human life is a “divine restlessness,” a divine “lack of peace” within our hearts.

He quoted Emmanuel Mounier, the founder of the French “personalist” philosophical movement:

“It is a permanent search for the meaning of life, an interest imprinted on ‘un-extinguished souls,’ on those who are not paralyzed by temporary satisfactions or ideological answers to all human questions. Indeed what makes our lives truly human is the ceaseless questioning before Mystery, before ‘something greater,’ whether we are three or ninety-three years old. This questioning allows us to see even everyday sights with the same amazement and wonder we felt the first time we saw them and to keep our hearts awake to the world around us.”

I thought I’d moved to the desert to die. But as the week progressed, and I walked up and down the trail gazing out at the Northern Atlantic, I started to think: Could it be I was being called to yet another awakening? Another unknown?