The Problem with Invisibility Is That You Cannot See It.

The Center for Contemplative Practice

Come and Rest

Welcome Home  ·  For the bedridden and the homebound Anawim

Two Sittings on Invisibility

Hosted by Michael F. Conrad, Ed.D., a grandfather by the fire

Your host, Michael, beside the fire. You do not have to come to this room. This room comes to your bed.

A word before you begin

If you are in bed, stay in bed. If the chair is as far as the day goes, the chair is the chapel. I am an old Lay Cistercian, and I am sitting with a cup of coffee and a fire that has no errands for you. These two sittings are not a course. They are a grandfather talking slowly about something that came in Lectio: the problem with invisibility is you cannot see it. You may set down whatever does not yet fit. One heading is enough for a day. Fourteen-point type, a line and a half of air between the lines, so the eye does not have to hunt.

The old made-up portraits are gone. The man in the chair is the host. If your hands are tired, ask someone to read a heading and then stop. The quiet after the heading is the retreat.

Retreat One

The Problem with Invisibility Is You Cannot See It

Introduction

Often in my Lectio Divina a sentence arrives that I did not plan. The one that arrived this time was simple enough to smile at and forget. The problem with invisibility is you cannot see it. I almost went on. Then I did not go on. The sentence kept me at the edge of what I know, which is where prayer usually begins for an old man. What sounds like doublespeak was a gate. Is invisibility real? If I cannot see a thing, does that mean it is not there? Most of my life I answered with whatever was in front of my eyes. A paycheck. A parish. A mistake. A hospital ceiling. Those are real. I do not deny them. The sentence would not let the visible have the whole house. I am Michael. I am a Lay Cistercian, housebound enough to know the value of a chair, and I am hosting this sitting for the Anawim, the poor in spirit, the forgotten, the ones whose legs no longer negotiate stairs. You do not have to leave your room. The upper room of the inner self has a door that opens from a recliner. Picture, if it helps, an old stone fireplace that has warmed guest rooms for centuries, and a host beside it who is not lecturing. The fire is not a demand. It is a place to rest the eyes while the heart does the looking. Ideas have no weight. They take up no shelf, except the shelf of a book someone bothered to write. Love has no color, though it changes a face. Mercy has no temperature, though it warms a room more honestly than a grate. The synapsing of neurons is real, and I am grateful for it at my age, when some days the synapses are slower than they were. Yet the thought that comes through them is not the neuron. The neuron is the wire. The meaning is not the copper. Already, before we speak of God, invisibility is at work in the most ordinary afternoon. I have come to speak of three universes, not as a system I expect you to memorize, but as a way of noticing what is already happening in you. The physical universe is the framework. Matter keeps our human experience in a form we can trip over. Chairs. Bones. Winter. The pillbox on the table. Bread. All of it is visible, and all of it answers to laws we did not write. A hypernova and a teacup are under the same invisible manners of nature. You can see the cup. You cannot see the law that keeps it from floating off the saucer. Gray hair is not a failure of that law. It is the law telling the truth. Bodies thin. Eyes ask for more light. The heart keeps a rhythm until it does not. None of this is an argument against God. It is the stage on which the argument becomes a prayer. The mental universe is also seated in matter, in the sense that it lives in a body, but it is the place where our kind asks questions. As far as we know, we are the ones who look at matter and ask what it is for. We name things. We pass the names down. We make languages for medicine, for weather, for grief. This is not a small gift. It is the glory of being human. And it comes with a trouble the rocks do not have. We discover that we want a purpose. We want to know what reality looks like. We want the pieces to fit. We want to love with a love that does not embarrass us later. And we know we are going to die. Now what? Those are the six questions I have called the Divine Equation. They do not tell me who God is in a sentence. They tell me who I am becoming, if I will let them work. An old person does not need these questions explained. An old person has been living inside them for decades, sometimes without the words. The spiritual universe is the third. It is couched in mystery. It is not inhabited by matter or by clock time in the way the other two are. Science is a magnificent servant in the first universe and a brilliant companion in the second. It does not do well here, because its instruments were built to measure what can be weighed. How do you weigh what it means to love as Christ loved us, when you have never seen Christ, and he never wrote a book, and he taught in stories that farmers and fishermen could almost hold? Here is the premise that has helped me grow a little deeper, or at least a little sideways. What is present in one universe is present in the other two, but not with the same manners, because the purposes are not the same. One reality. Three energies. Working as one, and yet not mashed into a soup. The visible does not cancel the invisible. The invisible does not insult the visible. St. Augustine said our hearts are restless until they rest in God. I spent a long time answering that restlessness with the loud solutions of the age. Politics that wanted my whole soul. Spiritual sweets. The gospel of comfort. The cult of the solitary self, which I have sometimes called the Protestant Principle, not to wound my neighbors, but to name the temptation in me and in the Church: to make myself the pope of my own unauthorized authority, and then to blame Peter for the fracture. The Holy Spirit has chosen a body, a people, a table. I do not put that asunder without melting the cross into cotton candy. I say this gently. I have been the man who blamed the Church for my own walking away. No one who comes to Christ is turned away. It is usually we who turn. The Catholic Church, as I have come to love her again, is not a crowd pushing you.

Reflection

Let us sit with the visible and the invisible the way we sit with a fire. You can see the flame. You cannot see the heat until it reaches your hands. Both are the fire. I want to stay with that picture long enough for it to become a way of looking, not a slogan you carry out of the room and forget by supper. In the physical universe, God made a visible home so that life would have a floor. Stars, soil, blood, bread. The laws are invisible and faithful. Your body has been under those laws since before you had a name. I do not call aging a curse. I call it the first universe telling the truth about matter. Bones answer to gravity. Eyes ask for more light. Sleep becomes a negotiation. The pillbox on the table is not a failure of faith. It is matter, doing what matter does, and you are still the person sitting beside it, able to ask what any of it means. That asking is already a step beyond the teacup. The teacup does not wonder why it is a teacup. You do. The wonder is invisible, and it is yours. From that stage the mental universe rises, and it is very good. We are the creatures who can look at a winter tree and ask why winter, and why tree, and why I am the one asking. We build languages so the next generation can take the baton. Medicine is a language. Poetry is a language. The Creed is a language, older than any of us in this room, worn smooth by saints and by sinners who said it before they understood it. When I say I believe, I am not inventing a private weather. I am stepping into words the Church kept, so that I would not have to begin the sentence from nothing every morning. That keeping is part of what I mean by the umbilical. Jesus reached down through centuries I will never visit. The Church, wounded and repaired and wounded again, did not drop the cord. The mental universe has a special sorrow, and the elderly know it better than the young, though the young feel a version of it. Memory holds the shape of a joy more easily than the joy itself. You can remember the kitchen of your childhood and not be able to taste the soup. You can remember being loved and not be able to make the love stand in the doorway again. You can remember a face and lose the name, and the loss is not small. That gap is not cruelty. It is a hint. There is a kind of invisibility that depends on my experience, and there is a kind that does not. The second kind is what the heart is restless for. Augustine named the restlessness. He did not invent it. He recognized it, the way a man recognizes his own handwriting years later. Spirituality, in the way I mean it here, is not a mood and not a technique for calming the nerves, though silence does calm the nerves. It is the third universe, real, personal, and entered by a choice. Not by a race. Not by a slogan. Not by the accident of having been born in a Catholic town. An individual asks, or does not. The Catholic Church is the way Christ designed for that asking to be met with something thicker than a feeling. Baptism, the Scriptures, the altar, the forgiveness of sins, the prayers of the hours, the company of the saints: these are not decorations on a private search. They are the cord. I do not say this to close a door on anyone’s longing. Longing is already a kind of knocking. I say it because a cord is not an insult. A cord is how life moves from a source a child cannot yet name. Original sin is one of the invisible things people dislike because they cannot pose it for a photograph. I do not need a photograph. I need a morning. I know the tug that bends my nature away from the good I already see. The saints knew it. The Fathers wrote of it without embarrassment. Virtues help the movement toward Omega. Vices snag it. I do not say this to shame anyone in a chair. Shame is a poor host. I say it because the tug is real, and naming it is a mercy. The end is not a theory I made up in a study. The end is Omega, the One toward whom complexity and consciousness have been leaning since the first light. Teilhard de Chardin gave me a map I still unfold when the day feels like mere endurance. Thomas Merton gave me a sentence for the days I cannot see the road. Charles de Foucauld gave me a prayer for the days I would rather keep the map in my pocket and not walk. Benedict gave me the ear. Bernard gave me the degrees of love. None of them replaced Christ. They kept me near him when my own energy was not enough. Here is the picture I cannot get rid of. A small machine, a vacuum that cleans a floor, reaches the first step of a staircase and bumps, and backs up, and bumps again. It is not stupid. It is built for floors. Humans are not machines, but there is a family resemblance at the edge of our nature. We can polish the first floor until it shines. We can write books about the shine. We can call the shine a civilization. We cannot, with innate energy alone, lift the foot onto the step that opens the spiritual universe. Someone from a higher nature has to come down. That is not an insult to the first floor. The first floor is splendid. Bread is splendid. A kindly nurse is splendid. A poem that tells the truth about winter is splendid. Splendid is not the same as enough, once the heart has asked the six questions and heard its own voice come back unanswered. That someone did not shout from the landing. He took flesh. The invisible chose a visible face, in a visible village, under a visible star, and later under a visible cross. The problem with invisibility is you cannot see it. The answer God gave was to be seen, and then, after the seeing was finished in one generation, to leave a Church who could hand on what eyes can no longer reach. Faith, informed by reason, is a pair of glasses. Reason is not the enemy of the glasses. Reason walks you to the case and admits it cannot grind these lenses by itself. If I will not put them on, I still have the physical universe, which is a gift, and the mental universe, which is a gift. I do not have the third, except as a rumor I keep deciding is a fairy tale. The gold is under the feet. I have stepped over it often enough to know the sound it makes when a proud shoe misses it. Baptism does not make the world disappear. It lets a person live in two citizenships at once. The kingdom of Heaven on earth is not a mood that arrives when the room is tidy. It is a way of meaning, answered from the Christ Principle, who is in both rooms: this one, and the one after the body has done what bodies do. You can be a citizen of a nation, a member of a family, a patient in a clinic, and at the same time a citizen of a kingdom that does not check your mobility. Lay Cistercian spirituality, as I try to live it, is the long practice of having in me the mind of Christ Jesus. I sit in the upper room. He is already there. What comes is less like a speech and more like sunlight on skin. Capacitas Dei, the capacity to receive God, is not a contest between the clever and the slow. Mary received to the meniscus of her nature, one drop more and the cup would have overflowed. We receive by the thimble, and the thimble is enough, because the giver is not measuring with our embarrassment. What goes against the grain is the turning. I must loosen my grip on being the center. I must let the reason of the world be a servant and not a pope. The ear of the heart is how a person sees what eyes cannot see. It is not a trick and not a technique you master in a weekend. It is a stance. Silence. A short reading. A willingness to be told something I would not have written for myself. For the housebound, the stance is strangely available. The world has already taken some of the noise. The danger is not that you lack a monastery. The danger is that the television, or the grievance, or the rehearsal of old injuries, fills the quiet that was given to you. I know. I have furnished silence with all three. The cross-cutting theme is this. Visibility and invisibility run through all three universes, just as Alpha and Omega run through them, just as energy runs from matter, through mind, toward a love that is purer than both. Spirituality is unique because the door is a person, not a species. Reason can walk me to the door. Choice can put a hand on the latch. The energy to walk through is given. Christ is the key. I do not make the key. I ask not to lose it in the cushions of the chair. The Church keeps a copy of the pattern of the key, in water and oil and bread and the old words, so that when my memory frays I am not left to invent the way in. A few observations, offered as one old man to another, or to a woman who has kept the faith in a quiet house longer than I have kept it. If you do not put on the glasses, you will still see a true world. You may even be kinder than some who wear the glasses badly. The glasses are not a prize for the clever. They are faith, and faith can live in a person who cannot remember the word for the thing on the nightstand. The spiritual universe depends on the physical one the way a flame depends on a grate. Without the body, there is no place for the choice to be made. Aging is not a disqualification. Aging is the grate, still holding. We bump the stair so often that the bump feels like home. Contentment on the first floor is understandable. It is not the whole of what we were made for. The next floor is not an insult to star-stuff, if that phrase helps you, and not an insult to the dust, if that phrase helps you more. Both are cousins of Scripture. Neither replaces the hand from the landing. Natural selection goes as far as nature goes. The next step needs energy from outside our nature. God, pure life, pure love, pure truth, three persons and one God, came down in a way a nervous system could bear. A mediator. A transformer. A son. Mary’s yes is the pattern of the cup. God took her, in the fullness her humanity could hold, into the life her Son already is. For the rest of us, adoption does not mean an elevator. It means a hand on the first rung, and then the long weather of carrying a cross that fits our particular shoulders. No one here is asked to skip the stairs. Some stairs are rocky. A marriage that never became what we hoped. A child who will not speak. A parish that hurt us. A mind that wanders. Rocky is not the same as wrong. Each day is a new beginning, not a report card. If we step back, and all of us except Jesus and Mary must, the cry is for mercy. Mercy is the hand again. All things new does not mean all things easy. It means the hand is still offered, including to the Anawim who cannot prove their usefulness to a busy parish. At the top, the old images still help me. A heart light enough to be carried. No theater. Jesus looks at the heart. He is judge, not referee. The ones who are worn down, with dirty hands from the climb, are not late. He has nail marks. He has a side that was opened. He says what the Gospel already says. Welcome, good and faithful servant. Come, share your Lord’s joy. And then, because he is not a bachelor God, he adds the family. My house is your house. My mother is here. Forever is not a long weekend. The saints are already in that room. You are not walking toward a empty reward. You are walking toward a household. The problem with invisibility is you cannot see it. To the ear of the heart, that is not a lack. That is the whole of what is left when the fire has done its work and the room is held by the heat you cannot point at. You may take this into your own life and set down whatever does not fit yet. I will still be by the fire when you come back for the second retreat. The second one is about the hand on the stair, and about not having to be young to be lifted. Until then, one Scripture is enough. Then the quiet. The quiet is not the absence of the retreat. The quiet is the retreat arriving. One more thing, because the Anawim are often told to be content with less than the Gospel. Contentment is a virtue when it means I stop demanding that God rearrange the parish to suit my weather. Contentment is a vice when it means I stop asking to be lifted. The first floor can become a piety. I have practiced that piety. It looks like realism. It feels like peace. It is sometimes only the peace of having stopped knocking. Knocking is allowed from a bed. The door is not height-restricted. If you are a woman who has kept a house of faith while the louder rooms forgot you, this invisibility is not the same as the holy kind. Holy invisibility is what the eye cannot seize and the heart can receive. The other invisibility is being overlooked. Christ does not overlook. The Church at her best does not either, and when she does, the remedy is not to found a smaller church in the kitchen with yourself as pope. The remedy is to stay at the table, wounded if you must, and let the cord do what the cord was made to do. I say this as a man who has been angry and who came back. Mercy was not theoretical.

Three Scriptures

Read one. If you want all three, let them be three visits. Someone may read them to you. Hearing counts.

• Hebrews 11:1. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
• 2 Corinthians 4:18. We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.
• John 20:29. Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.

Contemplative time: fifteen minutes

Lie as you must. Say, once, interiorly: I am here. You are here. Do not produce a thought. If a thought comes, let it sit on the hearth and cool. Fifteen minutes. If fifteen is too long, five is not a failure. If you sleep, you sleep in his company. Begin again when you wake.

Actio: do what he tells you

One thing, from the bed if that is where you are. If you can hold a rosary, hold one decade for someone who cannot pray. If you can speak, speak one kind sentence that does not correct anybody. If you can only lie still, offer the stillness for a person who is bumping the stair and calling it normal. If the Eucharist can be brought to you, ask. If it cannot, one sentence is enough: Lord, I am not worthy, and I want you.

A prayer of Thomas Merton

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

A prayer of Charles de Foucauld

Father, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you. I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my soul. I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands without reserve, and with boundless confidence, for you are my Father.

Eight sites every Catholic should use

Use them as you are able. None of them replaces the bed, the chair, or the silence.

• www.wordonfire.org
• www.scotthahn.com
• usccb.org
• www.ashenden.org
• www.newadvent.org
• vatican.va
• www.divineoffice.org
• www.ecatholic2000.com

Copyright Michael F. Conrad, Ed.D. The Center for Contemplative Practice. All rights reserved.

Come and Rest / Welcome Home / Self-Directed Retreats for the Anawim. Source Lectio: “The Problem with Invisibility Is You Can’t See It,” thecenterforcontemplativepractice.org. A personal sharing from your grandfatherly host, not an official teaching of the Church.

Retreat Two

The Hand on the Stair

The same host. The same fire. You are still allowed to stay in bed.

Introduction

Come back to the same chair. The fire does not need to be rebuilt in your house. Picture it, if picture helps: the old grate, the crucifix that has watched more than one generation fail and begin again, the hour that does not ask you to be useful. I am still the host. We are not starting over. We are taking the next room of the same house. The first sitting stayed with a sentence. The problem with invisibility is you cannot see it. This sitting stays with the consequence. If the invisible is real, how does a human being, especially one whose legs are finished with stairs, move toward it? The answer I have been given is not a technique. It is a hand. There is a difference between knowing a staircase is in the house and being able to climb it. I have lived long enough to know both. The mind can draw the second floor in detail. The foot still hits the riser. At my age the picture is not only spiritual. There are actual stairs I no longer take. This retreat does not mock that. It uses it. The Anawim have always been closest to the ground. The Gospel noticed them before the parish newsletter did. Poor in spirit is not a costume. It is often a fact of the body, and the fact is not a demotion. In the first universe, the physical, God gave a visible place so that life would have somewhere to stand. Bodies go as far as bodies go, and then a person is ready for a transfer the body cannot make. The transfer is not an escape from matter. God was not embarrassed by flesh. He cooked fish after the resurrection. He left us bread that is more than bread. The transfer is the next obedience of matter, once matter has become a question. We hit a barricade. Camus called a version of it no exit. I call it the first step, met by a nature that was not built to clear it alone. A life can be decent, even kind, and still be butting the riser and calling the bruise normal. The robot on the floor is only a picture, and I use it gently. It cleans what it was made to clean. It cannot desire the landing. We can. That desire is already a grace in seed, the invisible yearning Augustine named when he said our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Three hungers, still, and they do not retire when the knees do. To know who I am and why I am here. To love with the greatest intensity a human being can bear, which is often mistaken for the greatest pleasure and is not the same thing. To know what is true without waiting for the next wind to vote on it. These hungers are not answered by a better first floor. They are the proof that the first floor is a floor, not a ceiling. If you feel them in a quiet house, you are not behind. You are at the place where the hand can be taken. Someone had to come down. Not a slogan. A person. God, who is pure life and pure love and pure truth, three and one, came in a way that would not burn the nervous system he had made. A mediator. A buffer. A son. The energy we cannot take raw, he takes, and gives out to those who ask, seek, and knock. Asking is an old person’s talent. Seeking, when the feet are done, becomes a way of sitting. Knocking can be a whisper said into a pillow. Do not despise the whisper. The Church has been kept alive by whispers as surely as by basilicas. Mary is the template I trust most, after her Son. She was overshadowed. The last drop her nature could hold was given, up to the meniscus. One more and the cup would have overflowed. Her fiat was not a speech for a feast day. It was a body offered. With that yes, God took her humanity into the fullness a human nature can bear and still be human. Christ, her Son, God and man, is the place where those who die in his peace live out what they packed on earth. Heaven is not a denial of the packing. It is the opening of the bag. What you suffered, what you forgave, what you failed to forgive and then brought back, what you loved badly and then loved again: none of it is discarded at the door. It is what he looks at, and he looks with scars of his own. Here is the difference I need when I am discouraged, and I offer it to you without forcing it. God took Mary up the stairs in the way only the mother of God is taken. When the Father adopts us, and we choose, daily, to see Jesus and remain with the one we love, we are lifted onto the first rung, not deposited at the top. There is no elevator for sons and daughters. There is a cross that fits, and a Spirit who is not tired of us, and a Church who keeps the food warm across centuries. I say the Church is not exclusive in the small sense people fear, as if Christ were a club with a password. I also say what the long Catholic sentence says, and I say it as a man who left and came back. There is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, because the Church is the umbilical he designed, not a wall he built to keep the hungry out. She is custodian of the cord. She repairs it when centuries fray it. She maintains it so that an old Lay Cistercian, and a woman who wants her soul back, and a man who wants to help the Church by becoming quiet, can still receive. The top of the stairs is not a prize for the athletic. Jesus looks at the heart.

Reflection

Let us walk the stairs without leaving the chair. I want this reflection to move slowly, the way a person moves when the hip has opinions. Nothing here is a program. It is a host thinking out loud beside a fire, and a guest free to keep what helps. The physical universe remains the floor under this whole retreat. Your pain, if you have pain, is not an illusion and not a lesson you failed. Your medications are not a failure of faith. The fireplace in a monastery parlor has warmed bodies that later died, and the warming was not a waste. God likes matter. The Incarnation is the proof, if proof is what you need, and company is what you need more. If anyone has told you that being old is a spiritual demotion, they were not speaking from the crib or the cross. Both of those are very physical, and both are the way the invisible chose to be touched. The Anawim are not the audience for the real Catholics. The Anawim are where the real thing has often been hiding, in weakness that can no longer pretend. The mental universe is where you and I do our asking. It is diverse, thank God. A nurse asks in one language, a widow in another, a man who fixed engines in a third. All of us can look back, which is the spiritual move the mind was preparing all along. I have called this a kind of evolution, and I mean it carefully. In matter and mind, the movement looks forward: more skill, more memory, more names for things. The spiritual universe looks back over what is, how it is, why it is, and what it means, and then it looks toward a future that does not resemble the furniture we covet. That future frightens a person who has only the first two universes. It sounds like a fairy tale, or like a loss. It is a loss of the frame, not of the person. The person is what is carried. If your memory is thinning, hear this without panic. The carrier is not your sharpness. The carrier is Christ, and the Church keeps the words when the words leave you. Entering that third universe is by baptism and by the daily choosing baptism began. Baptism is the glasses. Faith informed by reason puts them on. Reason is not dismissed at the door. Reason walks you to the case. Once the glasses are on, you see the same room, and you also see that the room is inside a larger mercy. You live a dual life. Heaven on earth, which is meaning received from Christ while you are still packing, and Heaven after death, which is the same Christ without the veil. The six questions of the Divine Equation are how I notice the meaning while the bag is still open. What is the purpose of life? What is my purpose inside that purpose? What does reality look like? How does it all fit together? How can I love fiercely? I know I am going to die: now what? You do not answer them in an afternoon. You live inside them until the answers are no longer ideas but a person you trust. Lay Cistercian practice is my way of staying near the packing. Having in me the mind of Christ Jesus. Silence, solitude as I can find it, work as I can still do, prayer, and the community I cannot always visit but can still belong to. The Monastery of the Holy Spirit at Conyers received my promises. Those promises did not make me strong. They gave me a rail. Preferring nothing to the love of Christ is a sentence I fail and return to, the way a hand returns to a bead. Simplicity, humility, obedience, hospitality, conversion of life: these are not decorations on a Lay Cistercian card. They are the manners of the stair. For the housebound, hospitality may be a kind word to the aide who is late. Obedience may be taking the medicine without making a speech. Conversion may be refusing, today, to rehearse the injury one more time. Small is not fake. What the world calls preposterous is the act of belief itself. I admit a realm I cannot see. I admit that my interpretation is not the last court. I admit that the Church, with all her wounds, some of them inflicted by people like me, is still the body he chose to keep the words, the water, the oil, and the bread. The Fathers are not museum labels. Benedict, Bernard, the Cistercian martyrs of Atlas, the long line of men and women who sat in rooms plainer than this one: they are family who have already taken the hand. Merton sat in uncertainty and wrote a prayer I can still say when the road disappears. De Foucauld disappeared into a desert and left an abandonment I can say from a kitchen. They are modern only in the sense that they are near. The heritage is unbroken. Jesus did not leave a mood. He left a people, and the people, at their best, repair the cord instead of cutting it to fit the week. Now the climb, as it actually feels, because a retreat that never mentions weather is not for the Anawim. Each day begins again. Capacitas Dei is the amount of God you can receive today, not the amount you could receive at forty, and not the amount a book says a saint received. The cup changes size. The giver does not. You may receive more in a sickbed than you received when you could drive to everything. Do not measure this. Measuring is how the false self keeps score, and the false self is very pious when it keeps score. It will tell you that a distracted quarter hour is worthless. It is not worthless. It is a quarter hour in which you consented to be near him. Consent is the rung. You will be winded. Being winded is not evidence that you chose the wrong staircase. Some of us have rocky stairs, and the rocks have names. A marriage that became a long silence. A child who left the Church and left you. A diagnosis that rearranged the furniture of the future. A parish where you were invisible in the bad sense, not the holy sense. Rocky is allowed. The handrail is the same. I have said this so often because I need it myself. Just because the road is rocky does not mean you are on the wrong road. The Anawim series exists for that sentence. There is a mercy for the step back. All of us except Jesus and Mary cry out for it. When I step back, I try not to build a philosophy of the step back. Philosophies of failure are one of the ways we avoid the simple cry. Lord, have mercy. He takes the hand again. All things new is his work, not my recovery plan. If you have been angry at God, or at the Church, you may bring the anger into the room. Do not leave the table. I left once, and the desert was not the freedom I had advertised to myself. Mercy was waiting when I came back, and it did not interview me at the door. The Holy Spirit is the energy on the stair. Not a feeling first. A given. You may feel nothing for a long season, and the season may be the last season. The saints are unanimous enough on this that I have stopped treating numbness as abandonment. Numbness is weather. The hand does not depend on the weather. If you need a feeling in order to believe you are praying, you will quit on the days you most need the rail. Stay. The ear of the heart is not an emotion. It is a direction. At the top, the welcome is not an interview. It is a recognition. He has the marks. You have the wear. Between those two facts the judgment of love takes place. I do not pretend to know the weight of any heart but my own, and I do not know mine well. I know who holds it. That is the Catholic relief. I am not the pope of my soul’s final chapter. Christ is Lord. The Church keeps me near him while I still cannot see. Peter’s office is not my rival. It is part of the cord. When I make myself the measure, I melt the message of the cross into something I can swallow without changing. I have done it. The remedy is not a louder opinion. The remedy is the chair, the Word, the bread if it can be brought, and the old prayers. A few last observations, for the chair, before the Scriptures and the quiet. The next floor is why we were made from the stuff of stars, if that phrase helps you, and why we were made from the dust, if that phrase helps you more. Humans do not produce, from the mind alone, the energy to rise. Nature is real as far as nature goes. It is not the whole map. The individual must consent to be helped. Consent can be a nod. God came down to the bottom rung. That is the Incarnation, said without decoration. He did not wait for us to become interesting. Mary’s cup is the pattern of baptismal life. We do not hold what she held. We hold what we are given, and we try not to spill it on purpose. No elevator. I want to stay with this, because it is the sentence that frees the elderly from a false contest. The people who thought elevation was a performance are tired. The people who can no longer perform are suddenly in the posture the Gospel always praised. Poor in spirit. Close to the ground. Able to be lifted. You do not have to impress the landing. You have to permit the hand. Permission is a form of faith, and faith is the evidence of things not seen. Jesus smiles, in the only way I can imagine a smile that still has scars. Welcome. Family. Forever. The problem with invisibility remains. You cannot see it. To the ear of the heart, trained a little by these two sittings, and by a lifetime you already lived before you met this page, that is all there is, because that is literally all there is. The fire will keep. The host will not turn the chair toward a program. When you are ready, one Scripture, and then the fifteen minutes, which are not an assignment. They are the room. Let me stay with the hand a little longer, because a short paragraph about grace is not enough for a person who has been bumping the stair for years. The hand is not a mood Christ has on good days. It is the shape of the Incarnation continued. He came down. He still comes down, in the Spirit, through the Church, to the particular rung you are on. Not the rung you wish you were on. The one where the hip hurts, or the one where the family does not call, or the one where you believe and do not feel the belief. That rung is not a mistake in the plan. It is the plan as it meets your freedom. I think of the Eucharist here, because the Anawim are often the ones who cannot get to it, and the grief of that is real. If a priest or a minister of Holy Communion can bring the Lord to your chair, ask. The umbilical is edible. If no one can come this week, spiritual communion is not a consolation prize invented to quiet the disappointed. It is a way of consenting. Lord, I am not worthy, and I want you. Say it once. Mean it as much as you can. Leave the rest. The Church has always known that desire, when it is honest, is already a kind of reception, even while she guards the sacrament itself with love. Penance belongs in this reflection too, gently. The invisible includes guilt, and guilt can lie. Some of what you carry is not yours. Some of it is. The sacrament sorts what the mind cannot sort. If you can make a confession, even a short one, even from a chair when the priest comes, do not wait for a perfect examination. If you cannot, say the simple cry and trust the mercy that has been repairing people longer than your family has had a name. I am not a confessor in this page. I am a host who has needed the sacrament and who does not want you to think the upper room replaces it. The upper room sends you toward it. Mary’s meniscus still teaches me how not to force the cup. We want overflow on demand. She received what her nature could hold. You will receive what yours can hold today. Tomorrow the cup may be smaller. That is not regression. That is truthfulness. Capacitas Dei is a mercy, not a ranking. The saint and the shut-in are not in a contest the shut-in loses. They are in a household. When Jesus says come and meet my mother, he is not adding a decoration to heaven. He is telling you the kind of room it is. Family. A woman who said yes with her body. A son who did not skip the stairs, even though he could have. I want to speak to the lonely in particular, because the title of this work has them in mind. Loneliness is a kind of invisibility that hurts. You can be in a building full of people and not be seen. The holy invisibility does not cancel that pain. It sits beside it. Christ was left alone in a garden while the friends slept. He knows the room. You do not have to decorate the loneliness into a vocation before he will enter it. Bring it as it is. The ear of the heart is allowed to be tired. And to the forgotten Catholics, the ones who drifted and now wonder if the door still knows their name: it does. The cord was not cut by your absence. It was waiting. Coming back is not a performance of worthiness. It is a hand placed in a hand. If shame is the boulder on your stair, name it and do not build a chapel to it. Shame is a poor god. Mercy is the name of the one who came down. Men who want to help the Church sometimes think help means winning an argument. Sometimes it does, in a council or a classroom. More often, at our age, help means becoming the kind of man a younger person can sit beside without being corrected to death. The fireplace is a school. Hospitality is a doctrine you can practice from a chair.

Three Scriptures

Read one. If you want all three, let them be three visits. Someone may read them to you. Hearing counts.

• Luke 1:38. Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to your word.
• Philippians 2:5-8. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.
• Matthew 25:21. Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of your lord.

Contemplative time: fifteen minutes

Say, once: I cannot lift my own foot. I consent to be lifted. Then do not climb. Pain may share the minutes. Offer it without a speech. If you sleep, mercy does not check the clock.

Actio: do what he tells you

One small obedience, sized for a confined day. Pray one Hail Mary for a person who thinks the invisible is a fairy tale. If you can write three lines, write the name of someone who lifted you once. If Communion can be brought to the house, ask this week. If you cannot do any of these, place your open hand on the blanket for one minute, palm up. That is a fiat the body can make when the mouth is tired.

A prayer of Thomas Merton

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

A prayer of Charles de Foucauld

Father, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you. I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my soul. I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands without reserve, and with boundless confidence, for you are my Father.

Eight sites every Catholic should use

Use them as you are able. None of them replaces the bed, the chair, or the silence.

• www.wordonfire.org
• www.scotthahn.com
• usccb.org
• www.ashenden.org
• www.newadvent.org
• vatican.va
• www.divineoffice.org
• www.ecatholic2000.com

Copyright Michael F. Conrad, Ed.D. The Center for Contemplative Practice. All rights reserved.

Come and Rest / Welcome Home / Self-Directed Retreats for the Anawim. Source Lectio: “The Problem with Invisibility Is You Can’t See It,” thecenterforcontemplativepractice.org. A personal sharing from your grandfatherly host, not an official teaching of the Church.

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