Brother Charlie's Breathing

Brother Charlie: even the name made me like him, before he’d even spoken.  From time to time the Jesuits would invite us over to their residence on campus for a program that would enrich our spiritual lives.  Our work was always intense, our mission of surviving as a comprehensive university in a poor city always challenging.  So I found these programs encouraging, not only in their content but in their sense of inclusion and community.  The “jebs” were bright and eloquent, especially in matters of relationship with God and life in the world.  So I was surprised when they introduced Brother Charlie as the presenter for the day’s workshop on prayer.  He was a Trappist monk, wearing a brown robe with a hood and a rope belt.  Trappist – I thought of the lore from my adolescence, their reputation as the toughest order, the strictest.  But here was Charlie, his face almost translucent with a smile that was edging on mischievous, his humility showing in the way he chose the diminutive form of Charles as his called name. 

He sent us to our rooms to breathe.  How do we meet God?  How do we slow down so we can be aware of his quiet presence in us?  Just breathe, Charlie said.  He told us (and I invite you to try this) to sit comfortable and pay complete attention to our breathing, focusing especially on the moment when our inhaling turns to exhaling, and the moment our exhaling turns to inhaling.  Go ahead and try it. 

There is a moment of stillness, where our breath is neither coming in nor going out.  With time, we are able to hone that moment finer and finer until we are almost inside it.  And in that stillness, we found God, and came to recognize him as the source of our breath.  It was God who was breathing in us, every breath his giving us life.  We realized that the involuntary nature of breathing – something that happens regardless of our will – suggested God’s gift in every breath.  Breath became, from that moment, an image of God.

Fr. Greg Chisholm was a Jesuit, a young Black professor of Engineering with a voice that was rich and deep and reverent.  On Pentecost, he spoke of Jesus breathing his Spirit into the world, describing the wind as ruah Adonai, the breath of God.  As he said the words, a gust of wind lifted the sheer curtains of the chapel as if on cue, filling the room with fresh, cool air.  All of our heads turned toward it.  It was as if God was breathing the world, breathing for the world too weary, too poor, too beaten to breathe for itself. 

From time to time I will sit on our porch, and look at the trees waving in the breeze, and I will think of that chapel curtain, and Fr. Greg’s introduction to Ruah Adonai, the breath of the Spirit that Jesus breathed into the disciples still blowing, breathing for this whole wounded weary world.

But mostly, I think of my homeless friends here at Goodwill Inn.  I think of how persistent they have to be, finding work where there is so little, finding places to live that they can afford with nearly nothing, turning away from addictions and fighting psychological disorders.  I think of the tall, quiet one who spoke of the desire, in the night in the tent in the woods outside the city, that the morning would never come.  But in his chest, his breath continued to come, and his lungs continued to fill with air and the morning did come, and he got through it, and I’m grateful for the weekly opportunity that I have to help him know that there is within him this gift of life, and a God who loves him even in the middle of this mess, who loves him with every breath.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.