Jesse Scott Owen

Later this week I am off to a monastery, and I find myself anxious. I am looking forward to the time, to turn off my phone for a few days, to sit, to meditate, to pray, and perhaps to read and perhaps to write. I worry, though, for lack of schedule or agenda, as I would like some mystical experience, and if this does not occur, I would like some scapegoat. How do I compel God to find me?

I wonder what books to bring, Jane English's Tao Te Ching? Or Legge's or Mitchell's even? My David Bentley Hart New Testament? A Book of Common Prayer? Whatever I happen to be reading at that moment? Perhaps Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses. Maybe I will need The Valley of Vision. Or I could reread The Practice of the Presence of God. Or no books at all?

The question of books is one of my great objections to monastic life, communal living, asceticism—will I be forced to give up my library? Or worse, to share? Perhaps this would not be so bad (but perhaps it very much would be).

(My separation anxiety is such that I always pack far too many books. This may be optimism, or is likely more the worry that I may be struck dead while travelling, and so in addition to my mother's admonition that I never be caught, say, in an ambulance after having been struck by a bus, in dirty underwear, I should never be caught with only one book. Even in my walking-around, my backpack always carries three books, one remains the same and the other two change, circulate from my library. )

My greatest flaw (perhaps) is that instinct to box up God, conform him to my itenerary. Even in these days and weeks leading up, I have vacillated between great overcompensation: praying and meditating solely to achieve some running start; or total slack: alrighty, God, I will see you on the 23rd, and not a moment sooner, thank you very much.

Robert Farrar Capon writes in The Supper of the Lamb, "If man's attention is repaid so handsomely, his inattention costs him dearly. Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him—every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact— [...] reality slips away from him; and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol."

Alas, I am guilty (chief of sinners, in fact). It would perhaps be impish to presume that God will pull through, will meet me there, will continue to take care of me as he always has. And I pray he will.

"Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there."