This coming week I go on my annual retreat for week two with the Carmelites up in Oakville.  The Carmelite’s monastery is just in Oakville just above Napa in the middle of the wine country there.  And it’s mostly a quiet retreat, but I join the Monks for dinner every evening and then at the end of dinner they offer me dessert and I usually say, “no, thank you” and they probably say to themselves such iron discipline, such self control; but then I go out and I walk through the fields of vineyards and I sample the grapes from all the different fields and that’s my dessert.  However, I usually go in September so in July I’m not quite sure that the grapes will be ripe yet.  And then I don’t talk much during the day except to the two cats that are two monastery cats – Adam and Misty, and they got to know me there and always give me a great welcome.  I kind of use them as my role models.  What, you say, a cat as a role model?  Well, take Adam for example, as soon as I see Adam and he is just sitting there looking out at the countryside thinking I don’t know what thoughts.  And I might come back half an hour later and there is Adam and he is still looking into the mid distance contemplating, or as we say in my part of the Oyster Islands looking solemn, just looking solemn, sometimes they’d ask back in my part of Ireland, “how’s your grandfather”.  And you would say, “Well, he wasn’t too well but he’s okay now and he can sit outside and look solemn.”  And meanwhile while this cat is contemplating so naturally, I’m so restless.  So hard for me to just be quiet and just be.  And so in that sense I use the cats as my kind of role model.  In the last parish the pastor use to say, “Better not be too slow with the Mass or Declan will be begin to get all jittery.”  So, I am not a natural contemposite, I have to work hard at it.  But I need this, I need it very badly.

Now, in the Gospel today Jesus said to his Apostles who had just come back from their first missionary journey and He said, “Let’s just get away from it all for awhile.”  Like the poet said let’s get away from the weariness, the fever and the fret.  So He said, “Let’s get away from it all to a quiet place, a deserted place and rest a little.”  Now as the Son of God needed that, surely you and I need it.  Of course, when they got there they found the people had already beaten them to it and so they never did get their rest on that occasion.  But on many other occasions we have the gospel telling us Jesus withdrew to a deserted place so he could be quiet.  We all need that desert whatever it may be, the place where the mind and spirit are not crowded.  The work place for so many of you is so frantic.  You could probably identify with what it says in the gospel about the Apostles.  People were coming and going at them in such great numbers they had no opportunity even to eat. 

I think the work place today for many of you is probably like that.  Or for parents ferrying your kids hither and thither even in summertime, maybe especially in summertime.  Or for kids themselves.  Kids now a days are definitely much busier than when I was a kid with so many activities – all of them marvelous, I’m sure, but busy, busy, busy.  And then there is so much noise.  One commentator about that gospel says, nowadays through all our waking hours we are bombarded by man made sound screaming for our attention.  We are all wired for sound.  I’m wired for sound right now!!  And at other times too, I’m like everybody else.  I’m very much kind of a child of my generation.  When I go out for my walk, which I try to do every day, unless I’m walking with somebody I will have my Walkman and people say to me, “I assume you’re listening to gospel music.”  And I say, “Well, does the National Anthem before the ballgame count?”  And kids have all kinds of gadgets and things that they are wired for sound.  I was talking to the servers before the Mass. Olivia and Jake and Angelo, and they’re not particularly wired either of those three as much as a lot of other kids.  My niece, Catherine, when I go back to Ireland, well she is not a kid anymore but she really is, she is 29 but she is a kid; and I’m talking to Catherine and while she is talking to me she has her cell phone out and she’s texting one of her friends.  And I say, ”Catherine, you haven’t heard a single word I’ve said.”  And then she repeats word for word everything I said.  And she looks at me pityingly, a look that says, “You old people can only do one thing at a time.”  So we need the desert, we need a place where mind and spirit are not crowded. 

This past week I attended a course every afternoon at the GGU in Berkeley taught by a woman, a pastor in the United Church of Christ, Therese Descount.  It was a very interesting course called ”Cognition and Prayer”.  What I took away from it was, it was a bit technical at times, but what I took away from it was more and more studies nowadays in the area of neuroscience and psychology are discovering the immense benefits of quiet, of meditation, of prayer.  Not only putting us in touch with God which of course is the main thing, but the amazingly good effect that such activity has on your brain, and thereby on your mind, and thereby on your spirit, and thereby on your body, and thereby on your whole self.  So you can’t lose really if you introduce some desert time into your life.  The other thing that she said which I found surprising was that a lot of modern studies find that some people are absolutely unable to have complete silence.  One man after the last Mass told me he was like that, that he was just incapable of it and I said, “Well, then, you find your desert.  You find the place where you can have your mind and spirit not be crowded.”  I remember once giving a retreat in Dublin, not this Dublin the other big one you know; and there was a mother there who had a lot of kids and she told me that she had developed a wonderful knack that she used to turn her chair facing the wall and pray and she had trained her ear so that if anyone of her kids was in distress she would hear that sound but she wouldn’t hear any other sound and I thought what a wonderful gift.

There was a very famous Jesuit who was also a psychiatrist and his name was Jim Gill (Lord have mercy on him), he was very influential in my life on at least two occasions.  He once told me that he was unable to pray except when he was driving his car.  And so most people go to work the fastest way they can find.  He would go to work the long way around so that he would have time to pray.  And some woman told me after the early Mass this morning she does exactly that.  And I expressed my amazement, I would be incapable of that but I said, “I do sometimes pray in my car when somebody cuts me off in traffic.” (Laughter)  But it’s not a fear that you will find in any one of your missals.  And now after the last Mass a woman told me that the place she prays best is in the shower.  Wonderful.  It’s a rather damp desert, but it’s fine.

As for myself I don’t know whether my old novice master would regard it as prayer, but what I do usually on most mornings I make coffee, put on some music, sit in front my picture of Christ laughing (because that’s my image of God) and then sometimes I just look from me.  Sometimes I have my Bible, sometimes I think about my day, sometimes, in fact very often, I pray for people.  And it’s not particularly mystical but if I miss it I feel that my day is not quite right because it’s the place where my mind and spirit is not crowded. 

Now the desert is a place of great creativity.  All the great religions of the world began in the desert including our own.  It’s the place of compassion and forgiveness.  Every time Jesus came down from the mountain or from the desert He began immediately to tend to wounded people.  Sometimes when I go to pray I have a resentment really bugging me, but when I get up lo and behold it’s gone.  I don’t know how.  The desert is a compassionate place and above all it’s a restful place.  “Come apart into a restful place” Jesus said to his apostles.  A place where you can get below the surface and when you get below the surface you find that that is where God resides and where your best self is to be found and it’s always a peaceful place.  So I conclude with a short but famous quotation from one of the greatest mystics of them all St. Theresa of Avila.  And I will have this hopefully in the bulletin for next Sunday.  It’s her famous prayer that begins in Spanish:  “Nada te turbe”

Let nothing disturb you.

Let nothing frighten you.

All things pass.

God alone abides.

Patience achieves everything.

Whoever has God lacks nothing.

God alone suffices.

Amen.

rjs