September Self-Deception

It is often late September when I make my trip into Kentucky to meditate for a few days at Gethsemani monastery. Since I seldom see the monastery at any other time of year, my trip takes me out of the circular context of the world of southern Ohio in which I normally live. When I arrive for my retreat, the same flowers are always in bloom, the same trees are turning, the same birds singing. Nothing has changed since the last time I came. Time has been held still by place.

At home, I find no such stability. Every day, the markers of the year change just a little. The anchor is pulled up with each sunrise. Nothing stays the same. But at Gethsemani, like a childhood memory of home or a distant summer of love, like an old photograph revisited, or a repeating dream, the season remains frozen to its context.

Before dawn, the sky spreads so deep above me, Orion always at the same stage of his ascent in the east, the Pleiades always overhead. Away from city lights, the sky is so dark and clear that I can always see the legs of Taurus, not just his red eye like here at home, and the Milky Way is almost as bright as a moon.

Inside the chapel, the sun falls through the tall stained glass windows at the same angle at Vespers as it did last year and the year before and the year before. The solar clock has stopped here, has not passed through winter or spring or summer.

I too am the same here year after year, always looking for the same answers, never coming full circle, always staying suspended in autumn, never finished. Maybe that is all well and good. I will die, after all, in the world of circles, within the whole turn of some near or distant year. But in the few hours of retreat, I step outside the loop, stand still and firm in self-deception.