INTERVIEW: Br Richard Hendrick OFMCap, finding perspective in isolation

In our second CV Connect Webinar we were joined by Br Richard Hendrick OFMCap, author of the poem ‘Lockdown’ (a poem about the coronavirus pandemic which has been shared over 50k times). In this webinar, which took place live on Monday 30th March, Br Richard shared practical tips in the art of self isolation and how Christians should respond to this current crisis with prayer and creativity.

Bro.Richard Hendrick OFMCap is a Dublin-based Capuchin friar, whose poem 'Lockdown' has received global attention in recent weeks. 

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Catholic Voices (CV): What challenges or opportunities have you encountered personally due to the coronavirus pandemic?

Br Richard: I'm here in Raheny in north Dublin where we have a small enough chapel but we've a blessed sacrament chapel with exposition from very early in the morning to the evening, but we also have quite a vibrant apostolate to the confessional, which sadly has come to a close now in the last couple of days as we've come into stricter lockdown circumstances. We also have quite a number of men in the house who are hospital chaplains, who are chaplains to the hospices for the dying so they're seeing great challenges at the moment in continuing their ministry, particularly when it comes to the importance of being able to be with people in these very, very difficult moments for them and what they really want is human contact.

So much of the Spirit comes through our basic levels of human contact, so I think we've been challenged hugely to bring our apostolate to as many people as possible through virtual means of communication particularly. All of the friars in Ireland and indeed throughout the world have really taken to task the challenge of continuing to preach the word, continuing to bring the sacraments so far as we can to people, but particularly keeping our spaces of prayer open and our contact with the people perhaps online but at least open and functioning.

CV: One of the ways you've tried to respond yourself, virtually and digitally, is through poetry; which poets inspire you? Do you often find your poems emerging from prayer?

Br Richard: To answer the second part first, yes, for me prayer and poetry go hand in hand, and prayer is very often the place where the poems first begin to appear. I couldn't imagine the two disciplines being separate. In terms of favourite poets, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Milton, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Rumi - the famous Islamic poet... there are so many. I think every poet has something to say, I think every poet has some gift.

CV: Why is being confronted with yourself in isolation so difficult for most people? Like many people in self-isolation, I find myself trying to find many distractions; there are family around, but also I find myself taking opportunities where I could have quite time in prayer, and just watching TV or something else. So why is self-isolation so hard and is there an art to it?

Br Richard: I think a lot has to do with the way in which we live today. We live a very fast-paced distracted life and so one of the difficulties about that is we end up living alive with very little reflective space, so we go straight from stimulus to response without recognising that between stimulus and response there is a point of stillness if we want to inhabit it. In fact that still point is the place in which we can discern the presence of God in the circumstances that our lives.

The problem is that if you become used to background noise – if you have a lot of noise in your life, a lot of busyness, a lot of distraction – then when that is taken away the first experience that one can have is a very high level of anxiety and panic because it seems like the background of your life has fallen away. A lot of people are experiencing that at the moment, whether they're isolating by themselves or with others; when the background noise goes off nothing can be so loud as silence when we encounter it for the first time.

You asked about an art of self-isolation. Well, the monastic tradition from the very beginning both male and female, and indeed the wisdom traditions of all the great faiths have always set store by choosing times of silence and isolation so as to teach ourselves to be able to connect with that still point, that still place within the heart. The 'great cave of the heart' as the Christian mystics called it, the place where God abides, the place where we can begin to enter the great spaciousness that exists in our lives between stimulus and response.

And when that happens, we can at first find it a very difficult place to be in. We can find it a place that we're unfamiliar with, and as I say it can generate a lot of anxiety and a lot of panic. But what's important is to stick with it. It's a place that has a tremendous gift to offer because only in stillness, only in silence, do we come to true knowledge. That's why the psalms say 'be still and know that I am God': only in stillness do we actually enter the divine presence properly, fully, completely. 

There's a wonderful story in the First Book of Kings, where the prophet Elijah is in a very distracted state: his vocation seems to be collapsing, his understanding of himself and the role that God has given him is fallen away, he's in such a place of existential angst he walks out into the desert and lies down to die, literally to commit suicide. He has lost faith, lost connection with himself and the deeper things in life.

And the first thing that God sends to him is an angel who tells him to get up and eat. That's very important – we touch the most basic practical needs of the body first: get up and eat. And he does. In the Christian mystical tradition those hot cakes that the Angel offers to him have often been seen as an image of the Eucharist: the bread for the journey, the bread for the spiritual journey.

Instead of sending him out of the desert he sent him further into the desert. He sent into a place of absolute stillness, a place of encounter with the mystery that is God. He's sent to Horeb, the mountain of God, and there in a cave he goes through this extraordinary experience of first perceiving a great storm, and then a great earthquake, and then a great fire, and again the mystical tradition of Christianity sees in the earthquake and in the fire and in the storm the appearance of all of the chaos that exists internally within us, that we only really discover when we become still, when we become silent, when we try and pray. Very often for the person who sits for the first time in stillness and silence and discovers that chaos, it's enough to put them off prayer, to push them away from deep prayer.

But we need to take the example of Elijah. Elijah abides, he abides past the noise of the earthquake, he abides past the noise of the storm, he abides past the flaming fire, and when all the fat is gone, we are told he perceives the voice of God – in Hebrew – 'a voice as of a murmuring breeze', or 'as of a breath'. In Hebrew, as in many of the old languages, the word for breath and for wind and for spirit are one and the same. So he perceives that the voice of God has been with him all along. The presence of God has been with him all along. So he goes out onto the face of the mountain, and he covers his face with reverence, and the only thing God asks him is 'Why are you here? What are you doing here, Elijah?' In other words, why aren't you back where I put you, where you were supposed to be doing the work of being a prophet? 

So Elijah is reconnected with purpose, but he has to come first to a moment of meaning, and the only way we can come to meaning is by coming to stillness. Whether we're surrounded by a fire and an earthquake, or simply locked in with our family for a long time, we've plenty of opportunity to practice finding that interior cave, that interior stillness where God not will speak but is speaking constantly, simply because we are a human being. 

St Teresa of Avila puts it beautifully when she says to the beginner that the greatest and most common mistake a beginner at deep contemplative prayer makes is to think 'when I am good enough, God will turn up'. She says if that's the way you're thinking, you're like someone who's waiting for their best friend, looking out the window, while your best friend is sitting in the room behind you. You need to turn around, you need to go even more deeply in and recognise that God's presence is already with you. If you exist, God is with you, holding you in being. Our job is to tune ourselves into that presence.

CV: Have you got any other practical tips? People might call them 'prayer hacks' - simple things to help us enter into that space between the call and the response?

Br Richard: There are three great anchors that the monastic tradition offers.

The first is to do things habitually. If we stop-start we'll never get there. The most important thing is to create a discipline of prayer in our lives. Now that doesn't mean that we won't be interrupted from time to time. It doesn't mean that the chaos of family or the chaos of the monastery or the chaos of just human life won't take us from our prayer from time to time, but what's important is that we try and keep the discipline, that we at least offer the time. To dedicate a period of time even if it seems absolutely empty is enough for the Spirit to work in us. That's the first anchor, to try and give ourselves the discipline of a period of prayer. 

The monastic tradition offers some more wisdom on this, and says that the best times for contemplative prayer – if we can – are early morning, as soon as we've gotten up, and – this is key for us – before we have switched into the media of the da. Before we have become distracted by the news or the latest Coronavirus numbers or by anything else, to dedicate that first moment, to give primary intention to our connection with the Divine is extremely important. Because then everything else in the day is consecrated, is made holy by that.

The second anchor that's offered is the anchor of the breath, to really become aware of the sacredness of your own breath. The very first thing you did when you were born was to inhale, and the very last thing you will do before you leave this world will be to exhale. We are born and we live between the in-breath and the out-breath. And you know, all of the great monastic masters of prayer, including St Francis, practiced with the breath, recognised that simply being aware of the breath was to be aware of God.

Again, going back to the language of the Gospels and of the Old Testament, Greek and Hebrew, 'Holy Spirit' means 'the holy breath' – literally the breath of God, God's breath breathing in us, living in us. One of the great Fathers of the Church on prayer, Maximus the Confessor, says 'you breathe the breath of God in your own breath, and you are unaware of it'. It's about coming to the awareness that in each breath God is saying 'yes'. Yes to your being, yes to your existence, yes to the fact that he loves you. 

So the breath is a great anchor that takes you into the present moment. The one thing you are always doing in the present moment is breathing. If you're not doing that then you need other help, more than simply contemplative prayer – probably the Last Rites at that stage! It's important for us to use the breath and the breath is a great tool; we don't need any paraphenalia, we don't need anything else other than our own being, because as we follow the breath – and the Greek Fathers are very strong on this – we follow the breath to the centre of our being, and a gentle, calming begins to take place, a stilling of the mind and of the heart. We're not doing anything with the breath. We're just noticing it. 

The third great tool that's given is what was known in the West as the versiculum – it means 'the little word' or 'the little phrase', and very often it was a line from the psalms, or it might have been one of the divine names – one of the titles of Jesus, or a word of invocation. The most ancient one that the Desert Fathers spoke of is one that we still have to this day at the beginning of the Divine Office and the beginning of the Rosary: 'Incline unto my aid, O God – O Lord, make haste to help me', which was prayed on the in-breath and on the out-breath. Other versions of it that we still use to this day would be, say, the Jesus prayer – 'Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Living God, have mercy on me', or 'have mercy on me, a sinner' in its fullest extension – or simply praying with the very simple prayers that our grandmothers and grandfathers prayed with, you know, 'O Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in you', 'Jesus, Mary, mercy, help'.

All of those little locutions help, all of those little small words of prayer. What's important is that we pray regularly and that we allow the breath and the word to combine, so as to draw us into the present moment, because that's where we encounter God. The most ancient name for God, the most ancient word given, is at that wonderful revelation to Moses at the burning bush, where God reveals himself as 'I am', as 'non-contingent being' as the Scholastics would say.

But what this means above all else is that God is the one we encounter as 'am-ness', as 'now-ness', in the absolute present moment. God is always present to us. Our difficulty is being present to him, in all of our distractedness. Our moments of contemplative prayer are re-tuning the attention of our heart so as to be aware of the God who is already present within and without, and whose action within us through the grace of the Holy Spirit begins this wonderful process of conversion and repentence which eventually leads to what the Monastic Fathers called 'theosis', literally 'divinisation' – becoming as alike to God as it is possible for us to be while still remaining the human beings which we are, literally growing into the fullness of the image and likeness of God.

CV: Would you like to talk a little about how you've responded to this crisis with creativity and in particular the viral response to one of the fruits of that creativity, the poem 'Lockdown'?

Br Richard: I think it's important to say that I was not trying to respond to the whole crisis in the creation of the poem. The poem was created simply as a response emerging from prayer from two or three of the events that I had heard about that are mentioned in the poem.

I had read a very interesting article which was about the people in Wuhan, and their response to the crisis as it overtook them there. One lady who was interviewed had said there were positive as well as obviously negative things in the midst of dealing with this, and one of the things was that as the factories had closed one by one she was suddenly aware of the beauty of the birds singing around her, and she said to her grandmother, I think it was, 'I didn't know that we have birds singing and living around us' because the industrial noise had just been so great.

The second event then was the people in Assisi and indeed across Italy singing to each other across the squares, which was a great joy to hear, obviously, as a Franciscan – Assisi is the origin place of the gift that is St Francis and St Clare to the Church. 

The third piece, I suppose, was an email from a young woman who said that now she had been sent home from work she was going to be using her time to reach out to the elders in her community.

 These three things set me thinking and praying and giving thanks, and out of that the poem pretty much wrote itself after a time of prayer. I suppose it's all part of a personal response, but it comes out of that great Catholic understanding that all that is beautiful and all that is good and all that is true should be praised, because the origin of the beautiful, the origin of the good, and the origin of the true is God. So, when we contemplate beauty, when we contemplate a poem or a song or a piece of artwork, or indeed fundamentally when we contemplate creation itself we're led back to the origins, to the one from whom all beauty flows, all grace flows, all joy flows.

And that's why to some extent poetry and artwork can be sacramental, can be visible signs of invisible grace, which is the old definition of sacraments themselves, and that in the Church was known as the via pulchritudinis, the 'way of beauty', following the way of beauty. It has a tremendously long history. The Church was the great patron of beauty, the great patron of the arts, whether it was in the age of the Gothic cathedrals or the age of the great hymns of the Desert Fathers and the Ancient Fathers of the Church, whether it was the embracing of Classical philosophy and seeing that as a way of coming into greater contact with the Truth, in its essence, and even now to this day the Church continues to promote the good, the beautiful, and the true. 

Think of the images of Pope Francis in his Urbi et Orbi blessing, and its sacramental life the Church speaks in a way that maybe words don't, because we take them on rationally and intellectually, whereas poetry, music, art speak to the subconscious, to the unconscious, and really speak the language of the soul, more than anything else. We need words at times, and we always need action of course, in terms of the action of charity and the words that preach the Good News, but above all else we need the beauty of a life lived in the light of the Gospel, and that's often a sermon that can be heard by people within the Church and people outside the Church. That itself is an image of God who is the beauty, the true, and the one who offers hope to us even through the gestures we make one to another.

To say to somebody I'll have a chat with you about something, or about a difficulty you're having, about a problem that they have is a great gift, but to combine that with a ritual act like an act of prayer or lighting a candle for them or holding them in memory in a ritualistic way can often have a very much deeper significance for the other person's life. All of these are ways in which the Church has done, continues to, and always will honour the true, the good, and the beautiful.