Accidental Contemplative

Practicing the Presence of God with a Floor Buffer

Happy New Year friends! Thanks for being here. I’m taking a break until after Epiphany (January 6). In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this week’s guest essay. It’s a terrific piece by my friend and colleague The Rt. Rev. Brian Cole, Bishop of the Diocese of East Tennessee. Click here to learn more about him.

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Okay, now for today’s reflection:

Accidental Contemplative

By Bishop Brian Cole

“Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive.”—Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

For years, when I have pondered how contemplative prayer and holy silence first entered my life, I thought it began with a trip to the Abbey of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky. That makes sense. A visit to a place where the contemplative life is central is bound to invite even the most casual pilgrim to discover their own contemplative path.

Photo by Adrien Tutin on Unsplash

I was in my early 20s, a seminarian at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Having grown up in the Southern Baptist tradition in a small town in Missouri, I knew little about the Catholic Church. I knew nothing about monasteries. Or who would want to live there or what they did.

I learned that monks live there. A famous monk, Thomas Merton, lived there from 1941 to 1968. I had never heard of him. Merton had entered the monastery when he was not that much older than I was then.

From a monastery in rural Kentucky, Merton became a prolific writer of the spiritual life. As his fame and readership grew, his sense of what makes up the spiritual life eventually included everything.

Merton’s early writings, while always beautiful, tended to a more parochial Catholic apologetic. However, by the mid-1960s, still writing from a rural monastery, his spiritual vision sought to transcend doctrinal debate. In Conjectures from a Guilty Bystander, he would then confess—

“If I can unite in myself the thought and the devotion of Eastern and Western Christendom, the Greek and the Latin Fathers, the Russians with the Spanish mystics, I can prepare in myself the reunion of divided Christians. From that secret and unspoken unity in myself can eventually come a visible and manifest unity of all Christians. If we want to bring together what is divided, we can not do so by imposing the one division upon the other or absorbing one division into the other… We must contain all divided worlds in ourselves and transcend them in Christ.” (Conjectures, pg. 12, 1966, Doubleday)

I now know I was looking for something when I first visited Gethsemani. My father had died the year before from cancer, at the age of 59. It was as if a busload of people had died.

In my hometown, where it seemed everyone else’s father was a farmer, who also hunted and fished, my father was a high school English teacher, who introduced me to the world of books and a love for words. Along with teaching English at my high school, my father taught one evening class a semester at the community college across the state line in Arkansas to earn extra money.

Photo by Caleb George on Unsplash

Even with that extra teaching assignment, however, money was always tight in my family. My mother also worked as a bookkeeper for the small accounting firm downtown. Along with teaching, for most of my childhood, my father was the janitor at the Baptist church we attended. I never saw my father not working three jobs.

When I entered junior high, he decided he wanted my help in cleaning our church. So began my life in church work. Assistant janitor.

I loved it because I loved my father. I also loved the janitorial work because it meant more time at church. I had always felt safe in church. And welcomed there.

To go there to clean the building was a chance to have some special access to it. Some understanding of the space known only by seeing every inch of it. I yearned to see the spaces that were hidden from casual seeing only on a Sunday morning. I would see all the spaces. I would memorize the hidden spaces. I would know something new, then. Or something ancient.

I did not have words for it then, but I was grieving my father’s death when I visited Gethsemani. My father had been my first mentor. In high school, he was my English teacher, introducing me to the wonder of words. Outside the classroom, he showed me how to live with a calm and compassionate heart. With his death, who would be my guide?

Thomas Merton showed up.

The monk who ran the Guesthouse at Gethsemani spoke to us about Merton and how both Merton’s head and heart were open to God and God’s world. That description reminded me of my father, the English teacher who was also a Baptist deacon, the devout churchman who loved words and where words could take you.

When I was in the sixth grade, my father let me stay up late, on a school night, to watch the film version of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, with Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr. We watched the film together, both crying at the conclusion of the film, which finished after midnight. Until then, I had never realized that a story could open and wound the heart both at once.

Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash

Even as the church janitor, he always seemed a little out of place in our Baptist church. All the pastors, (whom we addressed as Brother, not Reverend), who served there tended to preach sermons that emphasized we were to love a fearful God, while hating and shunning the world and the things of the world. There was a strong divide between the sacred and the secular. We were not supposed to cross it.

My father, in his own quiet way, chose another path. Most of what he assigned in his teaching and so much of what he loved to read transgressed that sacred/secular line the Baptist preachers wished to defend. Again, they wanted us to distrust the world. But my father knew there were too many things in the world that deserved our attention and devotion. Words on pages opened us up to worlds so far beyond rural Missouri. How could going to those inner landscapes be a sin?

In Merton, I found my new mentor. He loved the Church even as he critiqued it. And he loved the world as he recognized it to be God’s creation. He trusted that the world could teach us how to be human, how to be Christian, how to be open to seeing.

At the end of that first visit, I drove into Bardstown and purchased a copy of The Thomas Merton Reader. A paperback with a green cover, the book seller suggested it was a good way to begin reading Merton, as the Reader compiled pieces from across all the areas in which Merton wrote.

In my early lessons with my new mentor, I thought I was learning about the contemplative life for the first time. Our Baptist preachers back home only spoke of the sinful world and how we could avoid it by being saved. There were actions to be taken in being saved. Once you were saved, all your energy was to go into saving others, which meant warning them, too, of this sinful world and to avoid it. It was the promise of life eternal without rest. All revival, all the time.

The contemplative life could not be more different. It was not the guarded, defended spiritual life I had been told about. Rather, it was open, it was here already, if only I stopped and listened. I did not have to listen to the preacher or a sermon on a Sunday morning. I was being invited to listen to the Spirit of God who was already present, already with me, in me.

I wanted this life that Merton was writing about. How could I find it? Could you be a Baptist contemplative? Was that licensed? At that time, I could not see a way to change, while staying put. I thought I had to move, to leave, to become something else.

After seminary graduation, I moved to Berea, Kentucky. After a season worshipping with the Quakers, I became an Episcopalian, finding a Christian body that welcomed my newfound interest in the contemplative life.

Whenever someone asked me how a Baptist could end up in the Episcopal Church, my shorthand answer was, “Thomas Merton made me an Episcopalian.” I said it so often I believed it. I thought my first steps towards a contemplative path were taken at Gethsemani, listening to the sacred silence that enveloped the monastery.

“Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive.” (New Seeds)

Now, years later, I realize I was wrong. The first trip to Gethsemani was not the beginning. It was a place that reminded me of what I had encountered as a teenager performing janitorial duties by myself.

Those Baptist sermons of my youth, that exhorted us to love the fearful God, also indicated that we could be far away from God, that we could backslide, ending up all on our own in a Godforsaken world. As a devout youth, believing that frightened me.

I wanted to be close to God. If so, I had to hate the world, noting the long list of things to avoid, not straying from the things of God. It transformed a relationship with God into a dysfunctional connection to an abusive deity.

It was an exhausting way to live. You could not pray enough, asking God to be with you enough, to save you enough and when in doubt, repeat. As soon as you felt secure with God’s love, the preacher was ready the next week to remind you how temperamental God was.

It felt as if such a God was playing hide and go seek with me. I wanted to love God. Yet, the God of my youth wanted me to keep proving I could find God again and again.

I wanted to be close to God. And I did not want to live with the abiding fear that my discovery of God was so conditional, barely held in place. I wanted to be in God, hidden, seen, anchored.

Thank God, as a young person, I discovered the healing and teaching power of an empty church.

I spent hour upon hour in the church, mopping Sunday School room floors, cleaning already clean bathrooms, picking up bulletins left in pews and stuffed in hymnals from the Sunday before. In an empty church, with my father elsewhere in the building, the fearful God that had to be sought after and appeased was nowhere to be found.

For the first time in my life, I realized silence could make a sound. In the empty church, I no longer heard the echo of loud and long sermons. I could hear the building. I could see grace and beauty in the stained glass. Without any words, a sacred wonder entered me.

Slowly, not all at once, but in stages, I began to realize I did not believe in the idea of the hide and go seek fearful God. Instead, in an empty church, with a teenager polishing furniture and washing windows, the God who is always present and I, who was learning to be, found each other. Merton did not make me a contemplative. Learning how to run a floor buffer did.

I had been helping my father clean the church building for well over a year before he trusted me to run the floor buffer. At first glance, it looks simple enough. That is where the trouble starts.

A floor buffer allows you to strip and polish a floor. According to the type of floor, you adjust the type of pad on the buffer. To run the buffer, you plug it in and then you squeeze the handlebar.

man using a floor buffer

Running a floor buffer taught me that one of the best ways to control something is by letting go. If you squeeze the handlebar too tightly, believing you will decide where the buffer will go, either you will be thrown into a wall, or the buffer will be.

By slowly lowering or raising the handle, the buffer would move from right to left, and back again. While quite tall for my age, I was a skinny teenager. My slightness, however, was not a weakness. In surrendering to the buffer, I began to master the task. The task was not to wrestle the buffer.

The task was to dance. I learned to let the buffer lead.

The preachers in my church did not approve of dancing. Yet, every week, I danced with the buffer in the church hall. By letting go, by holding on to the buffer with the lightest of touch, I knew where we were going next. In acknowledging the buffer’s power, I discovered a strength in me.

There was no copy of Brother Lawrence’s Practicing the Presence of God in my home church. There was no monastery anywhere near us, and if there had been, I would not have known what it was. In a community where the preachers spoke of the great distance between God and God’s people and creation, the unknowing floor buffer taught me how to contemplate, to be present, to trust that God was with me, in that church, alone and not alone.

The teenager buffing a church hall floor had numerous contemplative moments, where the presence of God was real and felt. At the time, I did not have language, did not know that I was standing on holy ground, as the buffer and I did our weekly dance.

Merton and so many other contemplative masters have shown us what a contemplative life looks like. For me, the awkward assistant janitor who still lives inside the Episcopal bishop, contemplation is seeing, in momentary glimpses, the God who always sees me, and sees me whole.

It is both seeing and sensing. The happy invitation is to linger in my momentary glimpses of God’s presence, not rushing past that moment to think there is something more to find.

At the time, my father possibly only thought he was paying me to help clean the church. He did not realize that he was teaching me how to pray in one. He gave me a vocation, or at least placed me in a space where I could hear the sound of no sound and come to believe that God speaks from no place and every place.

I see and sense my father best, still, when I am in an empty church. In an empty church, I see him, teaching me about words in a classroom, teaching me about humility while cleaning a church. In an empty church, I see him, and I know that God sees me there, and everywhere.

In the hidden places, discovered if you look long enough, God sees me, and you. In the hidden place, be it an empty church or an open heart, God sees and is seen. We do not have to make an exhausting search. Like the wisdom given by the dancing buffer, we discover God by not searching elsewhere, but by taking time to see the God who is already here, in us, and in all.

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