My mom, ever the rebel, was not one for “passing things down” in the traditional sense. But she sure taught us how to play tennis. My mom weighs all of 90 pounds and is often found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. She doesn’t look the part of an athlete, but boy did she play a mean game. Family lore has it that in Wisconsin in 1977 she was ranked #1 in singles for her age.
I don’t play much these days, but when I do, I can still hear my mom telling me to “get back into ready position!” For those who don’t play tennis, “ready position” is the stance you assume, bouncing on the balls of your feet, in the middle of the baseline. NEVER get stuck in No Man’s Land– the space between the baseline and the service line. According to my mom, you need to return to ready position after every single hit. That’s the secret of a good player, that consistency in your stance.
I am left wondering now in middle adulthood – how does this translate to the world; what is my ready position for life? To where do I return after an interaction or collision with the often-times chaos of the world? I want to say I return to God’s arms, but that not only sounds aloof but also is not true. I only consistently return to God’s arms at night for about 30 seconds when I hit my pillow, cross myself and say a Hail Mary, feel a brief sense of comfort, and then crash into sleep. Truly, I do believe what Jung believed, that “whether invoked or not, God is always present.” The trouble is, I am just never invoking God enough. I fear I ricochet so often from one thing to the next, that I keep going back to No Man’s Land time and time again.
Flannery O’Connor titled one of her timeless stories, “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” Today, it feels like all the evil out there is converging – thirst for war terrorizing the people in Iran, Ukraine, Congo; genocide slaughtering the Gazans; rape of the planet; hunting migrants in the US; and on and on. To be sure, there is so much good; it just does not feel as though the good is as converged as the evil. As Adam Clark says in reference to liberation theology, “organized evil outweighs disorganized good.”
These days we are all confronting our smallness as so many evils converge. The gut-punch of what seems like our powerlessness leaves me bereft at times. As a Catholic woman, I feel I need my Dorothy Day or my Dan Berrigan to just hold the torch, and I’ll follow. I feel that some modern-day Moses-like catalyst needs to come and part these seas, and en masse we will go for the good of God’s Kingdom, of Dr. King’s Beloved Community.
All the while, when I dream of this personified catalyst, I’m forgetting my own stance. And when I forget my own stance, I can’t see how God is urging me to be in this world right now. It saddens me to think of how many nudges I have missed because of my own distraction. Perhaps even how many modern-day Dorothys and Dans I have missed! I need to get into the ready position of life so that I can hear the “still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-13), so that I can get out of No Man’s Land.
I don’t think this means separating from the world. I love Pope Francis’ counsel to think of the Church as a field hospital. I think one can be part of that field hospital, can be part of the bruised & bloody work of living in community, while also staying connected to the divine spark quietly nestled within us individually. I think this human paradox just means realizing that although we’re enmeshed and entangled in this world all together as one Body, we also have individuation – we have a unique tethering specific to us and our Maker. And perhaps just remembering that tethering is my stance, and that stance is my ready position. Mystic teacher and former Trappist monk James Finley is so helpful on this subject, referring often to this idea of one’s stance in his podcast series, “Turning to the Mystics.” He speaks of “assuming the inner stance,” and noting that “little by little by little I can learn to ripen or mature in this habituated stance.”
Thus, this is my task at hand – getting into my stance, my ready position. Ultimately this means staying still enough moments out of the day to have a consistent awareness of God within. I fail most of the time, but even remembering just a little bit more helps so much. I can bear more witness to the world without flinching because I have a little more faith that I’ll be able to feel that soft Ruach moving me in just-right(ish) ways. To quote Yeats and Joan Didion and Joni Mitchell, my own little “slouching towards Bethlehem.”
I told my mom about this connection between my childhood tennis lessons and my adult discernment through a broken world. She cackled in her truly typical way, and I thought she had a little twinkle in her eye. We didn’t talk about it anymore, but for my daughter’s 9th birthday this past week, she sent a perfect little tennis racquet.
