Adult Practical Life

            I returned from a week in Georgia five days ago.  The week spent at a retreat center in Atlanta, with 40 or so Catechesis of the Good Shepherd Level 1 Formation Leaders and Formation Leaders in discernment—was rich, incredibly rich.  Every day, sometimes hourly it seemed, I was writing down in my journal different thoughts for articles and blog pieces and ideas to put into practice in our Cathedral Atria or Level 1 catechist trainings. One would think with all of this material I would have been spending every free moment since I returned writing. But all I’ve wanted to do is sit in my house, talk with the my children, listen to music, and piece a new quilt.  I didn’t go to Georgia thinking that I would come home and start a quilt.  We don’t really need one (in the same way that I don’t really need anymore new books—but quilts, like books, bring joy, whether technically needed or not). 

            It all began on Sunday, after a whirlwind, beautiful family wedding on Saturday (taking place 5 ½ hours after my flight landed in Juneau), when the girls seemed to be at loose ends, and full of my week of Level 1 discussion and reading and formation, I thought, “they need a work to do.”  Because it’s one of the most essential things that makes us human—we need a work, something fulfilling and satisfying, and concrete.  We need it more than being entertained.  And I think that’s why after a few days of summer break full of “entertainment”—movies, computer games (even if they are “educational”), and bouncing aimlessly on the trampoline, that my kiddos start to skulk around with droopy faces, and chant the refrain, “there’s nothing to do.” 

            So I pulled out the sewing machine that’s been resting since it pumped out 15 white garments in May, and the scraps basket and told them to pick out their favorite prints, iron them, fold them, and then come get me.  And we entered the magical world of napkin making.  And inexplicably, while I watched them iron, pin the seams, stitch, rip out stiches (it’s really hard to leave a 2 inch gap at the end so you can turn the napkin inside out), iron, pin the 2 inch gap, and choose a decorative top-stich, I realized I wanted to do it too.  I wanted to do a “big work” that would create something concrete and beautiful and useful. 

            And so A & J and I have been trading off who’s on the sewing machine, who’s with the iron, and who has the seam ripper (it’s hard to match up quilt squares perfectly too), and there’s been quite a bit of peace at our house.

            And as we’ve worked, side by side, and separately, I’ve been berating myself a little bit:  “Why are you doing this?  You don’t need a new quilt.  You need to do your homework, write up all the things you learned and thought  about in Georgia, and clean the bathrooms.”  But I’ve quieted and ignored this voice, because often things don’t need to be just learned and regurgitated in pithy blog pieces, but also to be incarnated.  And one of the best breakout sessions of the Georgia training for me was on “Practical Life as a Aide to Prayer.”  For a good chunk of time in this session, we put aside our notebooks, laptops, cameras and books, and in pairs went to our model Atrium and chose a practical life work.  For twenty minutes we worked with our materials.  One pair poured beans back and forth.  My partner and I did the “sponging work,” moving water in a bowl to an empty bowl, using a sponge.  Twenty minutes might seem long, but for me it went too quickly.  Noticing how the sponge soaked the water up so quickly, and how the water felt slipping through my fingers, a serene silence came over my mind, which had been bursting with questions moments earlier.  It seemed akin to walking the labyrinth, or Centering Prayer.

            In the book Child in the Church, Montessori reflected on the connection between practical life and prayer:  “they aid in perfecting the child, in making him calm, obedient, attentive to his own movements capable of silence and recollection” (24).  Just as a child pouring beans back and forth from glass containers in Level 1 or a Level 2 child tracing and coloring in crosses after reflecting on the History of the Kingdom of God, my quilt making is not a frivolous distraction from what I should really be doing, but my own Inner Guide’s prompting to be attentive and allow for a unity between body, mind and will to form as I piece and sew and iron and repeat, and to let the seed of my time in Georgia to incubate, trusting that in time it will bear fruit.