Monks of Tamie

Last 2013, I programmed my GPS and went to the monastery of Tamie.  Suggested by a friend, I first looked them up in the internet, and through their website, I was able to contact Br. Didier through e-mail and make a five-day reservation.  The abbey was just two hours drive from La Mure and so I packed a valise and headed there.  Just to be sure, I bought some snacks I can hide at the trunk of my car, if ever the food they offer isn't to my liking.
When I was but a mile away, my GPS brought me to a hill-side village and I got lost in its narrow alleys.  I parked my car and started to reprogram my GPS when an elderly lady smilingly approached me and tapped at my wind-shield.  Smilingly, she offered to give me directions to the abbey.  Apparently, she's been helping lost visitors to find their way on a daily basis, and like me, we had but one culprit for the misdirection: the GPS.
When I arrived at Tamie, I really don't know what to do.  I just found myself wandering around a big gift shop.  The bearded man behind the cashier didn't look friendly so I tried approaching one of the monks.  It turned to be Br. Didier, the one I contacted through email.  He told me to bring my car to the next building, just over the hill that blocked it.  When I drove to it, I was surprised how beautiful the monastery was.  The spring-time flowers covered a field sprawling before it and the towers looked old and imposing (Later I learned that this was only a 19th century construction).
Most of my days in Tamie are spent wandering at the woods, identifying beech, oak, poplars and evergreens.  I felt the cold rush of water by cascades and falls around the monks' property and had known how it is to be mildly brushed by the leaves of poison ivy.  I walked miles to see blooms and greeneries and cows and all the elements of spring.  I visited the monks' bookshop and even bought some souvenirs.   With the zoom of my camera, I spied on monks by my window and saw the abbot, dressed in a blue over-alls and a woolen lumberjack shirt, preparing a big wooden post, the purpose of which, I would not know for certain.  I also admired the way the building furniture were arranged by someone who has, no doubt, a flair for ikebana and interior design.  But what marked my stay are prayers, the monastic prayers. Most of the time, I would just be listening to them, along with other pilgrims and visitors who are as mesmerized as I was by the singing of the monks.  Psalms after psalms, the hair at my arms and at the back of my neck prickled at the haunting beauty of their voices, interpreting age-old chants in a rehearsed but still prayerful pace.

Lord, I am deep within your heart,
as dark as the night
and million times as lovely.
I sat by my window,
 your forlorn lover,
for I often mistook your silence
as a painful absence,
an emptiness other than
that which you are, that sweet
expanse of a space that breeds
love.  Yes, I am
in that place where you
embraced me and assured me
that I, your beloved,
am truly profoundly loved.

Asking to be confirmed

Last night, I had my second meeting for the preparation for the sacrament of Confirmation.  It coincided with the Junior High's night, and so Charlene, one of the candidates for the sacrament got confused and so didn't come for the preparation.  Simon, on the other hand was there.  Son of a very pious but internet-savvy couple, Simon's interests include comic-book writing and zombies.  Truth be told, I wasn't expecting Simon to really follow the program.  He wasn't even in the original list of candidates.  But this young man had shown unusual interest.  With him is Nadege, whom I knew only through a few exchanges of emails that we had recently.  She has stopped coming to the Aumonerie since 2011 but surprisingly, she showed up and asked to be included in the program.  She was of Portuguese descent, she's already in her senior high but she looked unusually young for a typical French youth.
We began our meeting with the lighting of the vigil lamp, which is nothing more than a saucer with a few drops of olive oil and a spindled cotton as wick.  Simon gladly demonstrated to Nadege how it worked, and our improvised lamp actually stay lit for more than an hour.  With my broken French and a bit of enthusiasm, we explored the meaning of faith, the importance of trusting, believing and putting one's faith on something. Videos and other things to animate came handy, while our little vigil lamp shone before us.  We were surprised after on how the time flew, and so we immediately and a bit hurriedly made our prayer.  I asked them to draw, and the two, completely different yet in many ways similar, huddled over sketches their made.  The pencil drawings of Simon and Nadege struck me hard, as they happened to be the most honest and most revealing prayers I ever heard from a French teenager.
We said our Notre Pere, holding each other's hands and then stood up to join the Juniors with the prayers I prepared for them.  The words of Timothy Radcliffe rang well in our experience that night:  Prayer is an act of friendship with God.  It's not about thinking about him but rather being with him.


The pages of the Sacramentary had traces
of panic and forgetfulness at its crease and tears.
Drops of candle wax dot the Easter prayer
while regularity sullied the Ordinary Times.
Spines are broken and leaves are folded
and somewhere, pieces of paper marked
a hope or a plan in a priest's mind.
Grime and sot is today's monastic illumination
on the Second Eucharistic Prayer, imitating
the familiarity and haste of every presider
who knew each of these words by heart.

How to get the sacred dousing

This morning, I decided to have some coffee with Bernadette, a retired secretary of the Mayor's office and one of the volunteers for our exhibit.  She was already boiling some water on a kettle while we're discussing about her last visit to Marthe Robin's place when suddenly my cellphone rang.  Annie called me up to remind me of my meeting with a family at ten o'clock... and it's already ten fifteen and I'm about a mile away from the parish.
I've been terribly out of shape for a year now and running back to the parish office to catch my appointment wasn't easy.  Kipling spoke about filling an unforgiving minute with a 60 seconds of distant run.  I did that, multiplied by ten.
Waiting for me is a family.  The husband is from a known family here in the parish, whose parents live in a village two kilometres away. The wife is a very beautiful Polish woman, with a charming accent.  They have their kids with them, Emilie, who was baptised on 2012 and Leon, the one I will baptise next week.  The family is very nice and they seem to be practising Catholics, a rarity in France these days.
We talked about how the baptism will go about.  Emilie started crying.  Her dad opened an app on his iPad and gave it to her.  The wife started breast-feeding Leon.  Polish names were spelled and written and a bit of an explanation about conjugating names was made.
I lent them a CD of tasteful music and songs for baptism and hoped that they'll choose something sensible. We wrapped thing up with exchanges of emails and numbers, and then I showed them the door.


Broken car wheels and doll heads
scattered on the floor,
stained with milk, spit and mud.
Of course, we looked away
to keep the legends of parenthood
as magical as it sounded before.
Blood-shot sleeplessness floats
like empty feeding bottles on
sterilizers, while it carried
a blissful image of joy and pride
that's only theirs to keep.

It's been a while

It's been so long since I wrote in my old blog and I just decided to make myself a new one.  Nothing fancy.  Just trying to find myself an outlet.  Or rather a drainage for my clogged thoughts and feelings that haven't seen the light of day, but rot nonetheless at stagnancy of wordlessness.

To you who somehow found my blog, I wish to introduce myself.  I am Fr. Utoy.  Five years ago, as a seminarian, I have a blog at Wordpress that I just got tired of keeping alive.  I got busy with studies and also, Facebook came along and so divorced me from my once exciting love affair with words.

And then I became a priest.  A week after my ordination, they sent me to a small country village in the Rhone-Alpes and I'm here since 2012.

I'm not claiming to be a good writer.  I never was.  I don't even speak English that good.  But the English words are my best friends and have kept me sane when I am confronted with another language that never seemed to love me back: French.  The English language is the one that consoled me when la langue francaise just treat me as a stupid and awkward foreigner that does not even merit pity or politeness.

For today, I just want to share a free verse I doodled while attending a diocesan clergy retreat in Annecy.

Knitted jumpers heaved at each breath,
the spoken words flowed like a sinuous serpent,
or perhaps, it is the solemnity of this air
that declares each moment a verdict,
a law spoken by angels, carved on rocks.
We stared ahead, an illusion of attentive gaze,
but our mind raced for something witty,
something cliché to blurt out, in hopes
of breaking the heavy atmosphere of boredom,
or just an attempt, a misguided wish
to funnel all attention to one's levity.
White hair that shouted haughtily of cynicism,
low-key snobs on faded jeans,
the current and the retro collide
and not a rat's behind was ever given.