DOWNWARD FACING DOGS FOR THE DOGS … and the cats too!

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2010
1:00 – 2:00 pm

Please join us in a celebration of movement, breath and love of animals.
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Donation based community class to benefit Berea Animal Rescue Fund
All proceeds to benefit Berea Animal Rescue Fund
Pre registration is not required.
Cash donations gratefully accepted day of class.
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Article by Andrea Kleinhenz
“The temple doors, built on rocks, were bolted. I crawled among boulders to make my bows at shrines. The silence was profound. I sat, feeling my heart begin to open…” from Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior I am hurtling toward the silence. Toward the Abbey of Gethsemani, home toTrappist monks who have prayed continuously for 162 years. Toward the refuge of one of the most influential American Catholic authors of the twentieth century, the late Thomas Merton. On a hot July morning after weeks of questioning the wisdom of traveling 400 miles to experience a silent retreat, I depart from my friends’ home in Dayton, the half way point between my home in Cleveland and the Cistercian monastery in Kentucky. I am ready to shut out the noise of our competition driven society if only for a few days. I am one of many other men and women throughout the U.S. who shut the door to the secular world and step into the healing silence of the abbey.

I am on my way toward the oldest monastery in the United States. I am grateful for this journey as I’ve become complacent in my life at home with my elderly parents where we count the hours in between meals and count excitement as viewing TV sitcoms.

Consequently, a solo, seven-hour road trip now seems like a ripple in the flatlined Lotus-leavened existence of my prescribed middle age. I have brooded on this island of captivity for seven years following receipt of a Master’s degree in Nothing Very Practical (though I loved the process!) and a move back to my hometown of Parma. While here, I have witnessed the vicissitudes of menopause and its deft evisceration of my libido, social life, chronic under or unemployment, the death of beloved pets, my mother’s heart attack and lately my father’s descent into Alzheimer’s.

Before these years of inertia, my propensity for flight scattered career, relationships and community to the sidelines as I bounced down a road of fear. Now that flight has slammed into the middle of middle age and my susceptibility for false starts, lost opportunities and geographic drifts are reflected back to me in that uh oh moment of having screwed up real bad.

So with these hounds of hell ripping at my heels, I finally plunge into this road trip, a hinky spinster tumbled like worn dice in the centrifuge of existence. My 14-year old Honda Civic, faded blue from too much sun in the summer and rock salt in the winter, rolls like a dignified old steed down the I-75 highway south towards the abbey, home of famed monk, mystic and writer Thomas Merton who lent his star quality to this quiet monastery. Though it was his charisma that drew me to the abbey, it soon became apparent that the true charism is found in the humble lives of the monks, and their unceasing conversation with God.

Several times I’m tempted to turn the car around and hightail it back to Cleveland as I have no idea why I’m going and because the highway bruises my sense of aesthetics with its spasms of construction, traffic jams and big box stores. Just north of Cincinnati the smoking ruins of a recently lightning-struck, 62-foot statue of Jesus reflect back at me from the rearview mirror. Author Elizabeth Gilbert recently wrote her bestselling book where she reveled in her eat, pray and love journey while I hang from a meat hook of nibble, beg and survive. In my imagination, her Tuscan hills already seem to overwhelm what I imagine to be the mounds of Kentucky.

Yet when I finally reach Trappist, Kentucky, the abbey, with its castle-like turret and massive buildings, rises above the hills as in a fugue. It is hot and I park my car under a small tree. I want to do a sun salutation in commemoration of reaching my destination, but I opt for a small back bend instead. It is late afternoon when I reach the guest registration desk where a monk and guest are deep in conversation about ticks. I notice at least five cans of Deets and Off bug sprays. The three of us swap our personal tick sagas for a few minutes and then the monk hands me the key to my room along with a reminder to remain silent unless in prescribed areas (these being one of the dining rooms and so many feet beyond the abbey itself).

I let myself into my room on the second floor, containing a twin bed, small desk and adjoining bathroom. There is a prayer schedule on the desk that lists the Liturgy of the Hours: Vigils, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline are the seven “hours” of the liturgy. Guests are encouraged to participate. Communion, held in the main chapel, begins every weekday at 615 a.m. and on Sunday at 10:30 a.m. The first prayer service begins at 3:15 a.m. For the first time in my life I am grateful for my chronic insomnia. It is dark when I walk into the bare bones church with its wooden benches and silence. The monks drift in like pale moths, black aprons over their long robes, and square off in facing choir stalls. Morning vigils begin, psalms reverb, and I feel like a tuning fork responding to something long overdue.

I drop like a bomb into the silent retreat. It’s a relief not to have to appear witty or smart, not to have to figure out my place in the social milieu. There is no room for competition in this holy place where prayer keeps the ego in check. The American mantra of acquisition and success is supplanted by prayers to God. Instead of comparing ourselves to others, the silence guides us. At mealtimes in the cafeteria, we eat in silence.

I sink further into this pool of inarticulateness. I walk outside where others already sit in silence and watch a clique of yellow butterflies flutter at a hummingbird feeder. On a small hillside a few feet from the cafeteria, I place a stone at Merton’s grave where other stones have been placed. Merton engaged in a lifelong struggle of how to reconcile the life of a humble monk with that of an intellectual who wrote more than 70 books, mostly focused on spirituality and social justice. The tension between a spiritual life and the outside world was a theme he continually revisited. I’ve just learned that Merton loved Narrow Road to the Interior, a famous travel diary written by Japanese poet, Basho. It is also a book I’m currently reading. Later that evening in the library I read excerpts from The Intimate Merton and also take out books by Henri Nouwen, a Dutch-born priest and Catholic writer and Father Beiting, Catholic priest and founder of the Christian Appalachian Project. A monk stops by and asks me to shut off the lights for the night when I leave.

The days go by quickly; I’m here from Monday early evening through Thursday morning. Though my insomnia persists, I don’t have the energy to make the 3:15 a.m. again, nor the 5:45 or 6:15 a.m. for that matter. As I try to attend the later services, from 7:30 a.m. onwards, I wonder how the monks, in addition to a multitude of other chores, make their cheese, fruitcakes and fudge in between praising God. Their self-sufficiency continues a Cistercian tradition of manual labor and prayer that began when the order was founded in France in 1098. Prayer at this particular monastery has been unceasing for the past 162 years and it’s a powerful thing. In an unexpected way, I feel at home.

On my last evening there I’m in the small chapel sitting with others as the priest silently says the Rosary. My thoughts stray. I don’t know the rosary, which includes 20 mysteries and several prayers such as the Our Father, Apostles Creed and the Hail Mary. Near the end of the hour long meditation I look down and notice a tiny salamander by my foot, his iridescent blue/green tail whipping violently back and forth. As soon as our eyes meet he scampers to the door. I hold my breath, hoping that no one walks in and crushes him. In his miniature brilliance, the creature looks like a broach that has fallen off a 1950’s couture suit. He is an electric punctuation mark to the end of a long prayer.

It has been a couple of weeks since I’ve returned from my retreat. The guest whom I first met at the registration desk looked me up in the guest book and kindly sent me a book by a monk who just retired from the abbey. The visit was a modest life-changing experience in that it led me back to the purer parts of my childhood faith and sent me back to Sunday mass. And given the past and current scandals in the Catholic Church and absurd edicts coming out of the Vatican these days that is no easy feat for this lapsed Catholic. I’ve already scheduled another visit to the Abbey of Gethsemani in November. The prayers of the monks stay with me. They pray for the world, so that we are not alone.

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