“But not a tear can I squeeze from my eyes…”
13th Century, trans. Sean O’Faolain, from “At Saint Patrick’s Purgatory“
In January of 2016, I cancelled all my commitments and stayed for a week at The Hermitage, a tiny house on the grounds of the Franciscan Monastery in Washington, DC. I’d first learned about the place the previous May when they were showing it on the Tour of Homes, and I never stopped thinking about how badly I wanted to stay there. Even the thought of it was enough to keep me going sometimes.
My stay at the Hermitage came just after my two years of volunteer service as a churchwarden had come to an end. It had been a particularly difficult year, with a clergy transition and several personnel issues. I had been on call all the time, on the phone or at a meeting or creating an agenda for a meeting or reading reports, while also just trying to do what I usually did to make a living.
I knew how badly I needed to get back to center, to start gently tapping away at the fortress I’d built around myself in order to remain clear-headed and businesslike while performing my duties. I had enjoyed the work and felt like I was making a real difference, but it left me little time to let down my guard. I was concious of how I kept winding tighter and tighter until I approached every situation with a stony will, never allowing mysef to reach the point of vulnerability that might have led to tears. But now I needed to shut off all contact with the world and do some deep emotional work.
I took my laptop with me but kept it in airplane mode the whole time. I had a flip phone and checked in with my spouse daily, but that was it as far as human contact. The first thing I did when I arrived was to put sticky notes over all the clocks to cover them up. Why do the phone, the microwave, the heater, and the stove all need me to know what time it is? Are they here to torment me, to invade my sleep and invite me to watch each precious second drain away from my life? I wanted, just for once, to live by the rhythm of the sun and the Earth rather than the human construct of time.
A symptom of the chaos in my cluttered mind was the sheer number of books I took with me, more than thirty. (I did use most of them but could have done without some of the poetry books.) I also had my ukulele and a stack of music. I had some goals: learn enough of the Hebrew alphabet that I could be somewhat literate when I sang at the Synagogue; learn about the practice of the Divine Office (praying the hours eight times per day) and follow that practice during my stay; write journals; make some artwork. I did all of those things and more. Some of my doing was simply not doing.
My stay lasted from Sunday evening through the next Sunday morning. Even with all the deep emotional work I was doing, it was Friday evening before the walls of my fortress began to crumble. Finally, I had unwound to the point of finding tears that I really needed to cry, grief and pain that I’d been compartmentalizing and putting off. I still needed to cry for my cat who had died in October, for a conversation I could never have with someone who had passed away, for all the little stings and big hurts that I’d deflected, for plans that failed. I just got it all out.
My breakdown was transformative and cathartic; the best kind of breakdown. I still had Saturday to contemplate and understand where I had been, what I had come from, what kind of transformation had taken place. With no quotidian duties to distract me and no way for anyone to reach me, I was able to do two years of emotional work in one week.
At some point during my stay, I discovered that my recording of the Hermit Songs was on my laptop, and I listened. I had forgotten why I loved this cycle so much. All of the characters are seekers, dreamers, like me. The marriage of poetry with music appeals with such immediacy to the way I understand the experience of being human. The song cycle moves with facility from humor and lightness to self-loathing and devastation. The characters rail at the Divine Ones and then invite them all over for a beer. To me, this earthy spirituality rings true and familiar.
Like me, the narrator of “At St Patrick’s Purgatory” has emotionally walled himself in. He greatly desires the kind of vulnerability that leads to transformation. But now he can’t get himself into a state of being where that’s possible. The apathy that he has taught himself so well by returning again and again to the well of temptation is now a spiritual dullness that he can’t pierce: “But not a tear can I squeeze from my eyes…”
I want to believe that he finds a way to open his heart, that the transformation comes right after the afterthought that ends the piece: “And I with a heart no softer than a stone…” Although the strong percussive rhythm of the music gives me a sense of running from oneself, I also can’t shake the idea of self-flagellation. Maybe it’s both, each footstep at the beginning of the pilgrimage feeling like a blow of blame and self-loathing. The hard work of pilgrimage is that, eventually, the blows soften and the rhythm of steps and breath allows the mind and body to become one again.
