A Single Cloth
She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth—
it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration
where the one guest is you.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, I 17
(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
It’s fitting that this excerpt comes from a poem in a section titled, “The Book of a Monastic Life,” for the monastic impulse is strong in me. Finding God wherever I am, in whatever I’m doing, whomever I’m with—that’s the theme that ties all my threads together. I’d like to profess vows and follow a Rule, a daily and seasonal rhythm that consecrates my life in a place with others.
I need solitude for contemplation and creative writing, and an active ministry in the world to include manual labor. For my trade, I’m studying building science and how to apply its principles to home performance (e.g., comfort, health, efficiency, cost). One day I might acquire a small business to steward and place in a trust, safeguarding its purpose from those whose sole mission is to enrich shareholders. For my ministry, I volunteer to hold vigil for veterans dying alone at the Portland VA Medical Center. I’m about to publish an essay about combat-induced moral injury, a piece that emerged alongside a family archival project.
In a society that celebrates productivity and wealth accumulation, I’ve made confounding choices, wandering both intellectually and geographically as I’ve indulged my curiosity. From the outside this may appear wasteful. Yet someone needs to explore off the accepted path and risk accomplishing nothing at all. The Romans called this active unemployment “otium,” and Epicureans, who emphasized a virtuous life of contemplation and friendship, favored it. I believe that these unstructured, undirected detours offer their own boon, for a crooked path can reveal solutions to the complex problems that flummox our institutions.
In the single cloth I’m weaving, I care for a sacred space and transpose the best of early Mormonism, especially its radical kinship and divine embodiment. What does a merger of monasticism and matrimony in the Mormon tradition look like?