Ellen Kolb

Re-collection

I walk for fun, to explore, to more-or-less exercise. I also walk to keep my head on straight. I wouldn’t have gotten through today without a couple of miles outside.

I’m a political critter, you see. I’ve been a campaign staffer, an activist, a blogger from the State House, to name a few pastimes. Yesterday was election day after the nastiest campaign year I’ve ever experienced. This has been a backed-up-sewer of a season.

Nothing will flush it out except time on the trails.

All I had today was time for a couple of local miles. Manchester’s Piscataquog rail trail came through for me. There were enough leaves left on the trees to serve as a canopy. The overcast sky suited me; bright sunlight would have left me with a slashing headache.

Forty good minutes: enough time to escape agitation. Time to block out the noise, turn away from the news feeds, take lots of deep breaths, recall what’s important.

A man biked past me. I recognized him as the unofficial adopter of the trail, picking up bags of trash, neatly hanging fresh plastic bags every hundred yards or so. Seeing him was oddly consoling and reassuring. He has a simple, selfless volunteer’s dedication to an unsung job that consists of keeping a public area pretty.

Beat that, candidates.

Decompression is going to take awhile. Today’s walk was a good start.

Merton on activism and “the real hope”

I’m indebted to Frank Weathers at Patheos for bringing Thomas Merton’s Letter to a Young Activist to my attention. The Patheos post came just after the 2012 election, after I had been a staff member on a statewide political campaign that fell short. Merton’s words were just what I needed to hear and ponder.

I offer an excerpt for your consideration, at the end of a campaign that makes 2012 look like a walk in the park. Go to the polls, for sure, but go with discernment and a spirit devoid of bitterness.

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important….

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration and confusion.

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do God’s will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it before hand.

A Holy Door I’ll remember

Unless my understanding is dim (always a possibility), every year is a Year of Mercy in the economy of salvation. Even so, I understand and rejoice in Pope Francis’s declaration of the Jubilee Year of Mercy now drawing to a close. I’ve enjoyed the little delights, the mini-pilgrimages, visiting different churches with Holy Doors. Each has been a place of prayer and peace.

I was privileged early in the year to travel to Venice, Italy, an unexpected blessing that materialized on very short notice. I was eager to visit Basilica San Marco, which I knew was a Holy Door pilgrimage site. As I approached the church, I noticed two doors in use: a large central door was for tourists, with a smaller door to the right for pilgrims.

baptistery-in-san-marco-2 — dome inside Baptistery, Basilica San Marco, Venice

Once inside, I was guided to the Baptistery, where at first I was too stunned by the grandeur to pray. I was much more tourist than pilgrim at first. Get a grip, I told myself more than once. Eventually, alone in the splendid room, I was able to pray – beginning with a quick thank You.

The very antiquity of my surroundings gave me pause. My diocesan cathedral was built about 120 years ago. That’s old, by local standards. The Baptistery in Basilica San Marco, on the other hand, is a 14th-century addition to an 11th-century church.

After a few minutes, the art and ornamentation became less distracting to me and more integrated into worship of Christ. My very solitude became a gift. I liked being alone in the silent Baptistery when I knew that guided tours were going on nearby in the main part of the basilica. It was the off-season for tourists, I guess, and that was my good fortune.

Eventually, the sense of being a tourist faded. I was in a place consecrated to God. The communion of saints became vivid to me as I knelt in a place where fellow Christians had knelt nearly a millenium before.The stories told in the mosaics were familiar and needed no translation. The Blessed Sacrament was the Real Presence.

Making a Holy Year pilgrimage is as easy as going to one’s own diocesan cathedral or other designated spot. (In my own state, the Bishop has even blessed a Holy Door in the chapel at the men’s State Prison for the inmates there.) I didn’t need Europe for my Jubilee celebration. I got it nevertheless, through a set of circumstances I couldn’t have anticipated even six months in advance. Who knows why? Some blessings make no sense, and I’m left with nothing to do but whisper a prayer of gratitude.