Peace and Tranquility

 

Gators 65 Houston 63 for an NCAA championship win. Did you watch it all the way, Robert? Robert was our Cove School class of 1949 basketball star, and I've watched him sink a jump shot from half-court at over 75 years of age. Robert, who will turn 90 in May, and may the Lord add his blessing.

My Laughing Place under the cedar tree across the street down at the Bay's edge evaporated ten and a piece years ago when we sold the Old Place and moved to 7H. I was tentative for a while, but have come to peace with it upon finding just the right arrangement: 

this spot in 7H by a living room window shutter looking out across St Andrews Bay, at a table my mother had made for me after my father died, in my favorite office chair that I brought from my office at HNES, the Bill Lloyd Building upon my retirement as school chaplain in, what?, must have been 2007? I retired when Kristen graduated from HNES and went on to high school. 

Holding the numbers in my head - - they seem to slip nowadays, nomesane?

So, this is MLP now, where in the early dark wee hours before dawn I find Peace, as now. Peace and Quiet; Pete, Linda's father, who died of emphysema at age 65 in December 1970, used to say, when asked what he wanted for any gift occasion, "Peace and Tranquility." A driven person in my two "careers," I didn't understand then, but wisdom comes with age, ready or not.

Peace at this age - - I'm exactly four months behind Robert - - comes dripping slow, remembering Yeats on the hard, grey pavement of London, yearning for home as he determined to arise and go to Innisfree, and a cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; quiet, solitude, tranquility, peace comes dripping slow.

And you don't have to wait for the Peace of God that William Alexander Percy describes as the struggle of conflict and pain that is finally and only "closed in the sod" - - Peace that only comes when the last shovelful of dirt is tossed onto your coffin. For me, there is Peace here. There was Peace at MLP when I went there to absorb the deaths of loved ones and close friends, and my own medical prognosis at age 75 - - hey, I'm almost fifteen years on, eh?

Peace yesterday: watching a large red vessel enter the Bay at the Pass, thinking it was a seagoing support craft on her way to Eastern Shipbuilding for overhaul or such, then watching as she turned and headed toward 7H. A large 7 on her hull, as she came closer, SEVEN SEAS on her bow, making for the West Terminal to load spools. Spools of what? Maybe undersea cable for a project? IDK.  

Peace here at The Shutters, Quiet before Tuesday breaks into whatever God has in mind for me in this day of my countdown! So, from a nearly lifelong friend, a meditation by Cardinal Wyszynski of Poland, a holy man who was terribly tormented by temporal powers.          

Quiet is found, not so much around us as within ourselves. To be quiet and concentrated does not mean that one has to be in a peaceful, cloister-like, deserted place far from all tumult. To say this would be an oversimplification…To be quiet means to have quiet in one’s soul. And this is something completely different. It is possible to be quiet and have quietness in one’s soul in the middle of the rowdiest street, of the noisest work… We must aquire our own quiet. Of course, one can do something to lessen the tumult of external life, and this is a very necessary thing. One can also guard against the creation of unnecessary noise; but none of this will solve the real problem unless we have quiet within ourselves…. Nor is solitude necessary to achieve silence. Isolation does not constitute the perfection of our life. It can be a helpful condition of it, and an appropriate instrument of the interior life. Yet one can be isolated and not alone. Indeed, at times a man with all the proper conditions for isolation has all of all inside him…

Perfect solitude…will depend not on leaving the world but on remaining in the presence of God. It is not this occupation or that, this type of work or that, but only our inner relation to God that confers our solitude and quiet. Only then are we continually alone with God. This is so because God fills the whole world… We are unceasingly plunged in God, for in him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). To be solitary means to share in God’s solitude. We must learn to acquire this art in our daily work as an indispensable condition of our quiet.

Blessed Stefan Wyszynski