Unencumbered Time

April 9, 2026

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When I returned home from a spiritual retreat several years ago at the Trappist monastery in western Massachusetts, my wife asked me, “What do you do there?” I answered, “Nothing.” During my Easter retreat there last weekend I kept a journal so you can see what “nothing” looks like.

April 2, Holy Thursday

10:30am
After arriving, getting settled in the same room (named the “St. Catherine Room) I was assigned at my last retreat 11 years ago, I sat in the single upholstered chair and immediately became aware of time.

A monk calls his individual sleeping room his cell. It becomes for him a great source of comfort. Mine is simply outfitted: a single twin bed, a small desk with cane-backed chair (no thousand-dollar Aeron here), a nightstand, and three lamps for a soft wash of light conducive to tranquility. On the wall above the desk is a small crucifix and above the bed a ceramic rendering of Catherine of Sienna.

I was pleased to be with Saint Catherine again. I visited her home in Sienna many years ago, so I feel an affinity toward her, the 24th child her parents birthed, and a towering figure in the history of the Catholic Church. They preserve her severed head in one of the churches there, and I regret not having viewed it during my trip. I must go again to Sienna and also to Assisi.

But back to time. I realize how little time I dedicate in my day to just sitting to think. Yes, sit to think. 

Warren Buffett:

"I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business." 

12pm
Lunch: No talking. Silence. We sit at rectangular tables of four, and I was across from a woman and did not want to stare at her while I chewed, so I was forced to gaze out the window as I ate. This forced me to contemplate a fir tree, gigantic, and perfectly formed, as if by a sculptor. Without silence, without reading or watching YouTube clips, I would not have noticed the tree.

What do poets and pray-ers all join in extolling? Silence. The silence that leads to the contemplation of beauty. The world truly is “charged with the grandeur of God” – if we notice it. Perhaps it’s our inattention that causes us to consider God hidden. Obscura in the Latin.

1:00pm
I love my Catherine of Sienna cell, with a door out to a small, fenced-in garden. No flowers or vegetables, just a carpet of grass greening up with the warming temperatures, and a low perennial bush of some sort. I could live here.

An hour until None at 2:30. What to do with this unencumbered time?

2:30pm
What did I do? I dozed, accidentally slipping away into a refreshing half-hour or so of sleep. (I got to sleep past midnight yesterday after commuting to Hope Lodge in Manhattan to teach healing poetry to their cancer patients.)

Prayed None on my own rather than get over to the monastery church in the rain. It was the right thing to do because in the quiet calm of my cell, these moving words of Psalm 54 rang out: “If this had been done by an enemy, I could bear it. But it is you, my own companion, my intimate friend!”

It caused me to realize how my betrayals have hurt others.

3:00pm
Chatted with my friend Ed, who volunteers here. We became pals during my prior retreats and he follows my weekly blog without fail. I called him my groupie. We washed the dishes together, and I took over from him the task of lifting heavy racks of dishes into and out of the sanitizer. I joked about it so he wouldn’t feel lessened: “I’m Ukrainian. We’re strong.” It turns out, Ed confided, he has Parkinson’s.

4:00pm
We retreatants ( there are eleven or twelve 12 of us) trooped to the church for the solemn Mass of the Lord’s Supper, which commemorates the Passover meal during which Christ washed the feet of his disciples, instituted the Eucharist (“Do this in memory of me.”), and repeated his one great commandment to us: love one another. 

I was taken by how slowly the prayers of this Mass were said, compared to the twenty-minute Masses we get in many parish churches. These monks celebrate the Mass daily, year after year, but do not get bored with it or lackadaisical about it.

Next up: supper of ham and cheese on pumpernickel. Followed by Compline in the church to end the day.

6:30pm
The monks can stretch a twenty-minute Mass to an hour and twenty. Supper, on the other hand, was over in twenty minutes. Maybe because the sandwiches contain one slice of ham and one slice of cheese. I wouldn’t call it a sandwich. Maybe a heavy hors d'oeuvre.

I impressed myself with how quickly I can come to dislike someone. We sit at tables of four in the refectory, as I said. Next to me tonight was a slim woman dressed for a yoga class, all in form-fitting black Spandex. In a monastery? She slurped her soup. And she would stop eating after two or three bites and just sit there staring at her plate for a full minute. It must be some hack she does to control her appetite, which would explain the trim figure. To think that only minutes before I had been pondering Christ’s prime directive – love one another.


April 3, Good Friday

5:30am
Don’t try to tell me my body clock and the spinning of the planet are not in some kind of cahoots. The first service of the day, Vigils, was scheduled for 4:30am. So I set my iPhone alarm for 4 o’clock. I awoke in my pitch-black cell at 3:59.

The monks’ chanting of the psalms and antiphons this morning was arresting. Especially the words, “They led him like a lamb to the slaughter.” Because it’s Good Friday, marking the torture and killing of Christ, passages are chanted from the Hebrew Scriptures’ book of "Lamentations," attributed to the prophet Jeremiah. 

“Time” is again, or still, on my mind. How, as we age, we need to sleep less and less, as if we want to spend as many of our remaining hours awake and active, squeezing out the final drops of living left to us.

I have a poem percolating – something about time. And the idea of “unencumbered” hours. But this is a complex subject and I doubt I’m intellectually up to it.

Snow forecast this morning for these high hills of western Massachusetts. The walk from the retreat house to the church was dark, wet, and raw. The lights of Worchester on the distant horizon through the mist. My kind of weather!

When I returned from Vigils, the retreat house and refectory were dark, but I was able to glean a cup of coffee from yesterday’s remains in the refectory thermos, and I found a microwave in the kitchen to make it palatable. I’m a happy camper, considering it’s Good Friday, with crucifixion on the mind.

I was stopped cold at these words from "Lamentations," referring to the ruin of Jerusalem by the Babylonians:

Is there any pain like my pain,
which has been ruthlessly inflicted upon me,

With which the LORD has tormented me
on the day of his blazing wrath?

From on high he hurled fire down
into my very bones;

He has left me desolate,
in misery all day long.

I wonder how the modern state of Israel, having such pain in their history, can bring themselves to inflict the same on their neighbors, especially the innocent women and children of Gaza. How do the Israelis reconcile their “hurling down of fire from on high?” 

9:30am
Without Ed onsite today to take care of us retreatants, the monks, left to their own devices, essentially forgot about us. No one was here to escort us through the cloisters to the church for Lauds at 7:40. No one here to prepare breakfast. Guest what? We took care of ourselves. Found the chilled eggs and yogurt in the fridge. Ate and cleaned up after ourselves. A monk finally came to the refectory and apologized. It seems whoever was assigned to us this morning didn’t show.

11:50am
Spent the morning in my cell reading – The Naked Now by typically obscure Richard Rohr ranting about his non-dualistic view of the world – and trying to capture the poem about time that has been poking at me since yesterday. I tried to just get some words down:

Unencumbered
Is sitting to think for an hour merely 
a euphemism for daydreaming?
If so, is that so bad? Tell me, 
what else should I have done?

So bask in it, bathe in it, for dreaming 
is a euphemism for hope, after all, 
and hope is all we have as humans.

The unencumbered hour is a consummation
devoutly to be desired, what with guns and 
bombs and CNN unbounded. A jug of wine, 
a loaf of bread and thou are no substitute 
for a latte grande, a brace of almond biscotti – 
and a ready laptop atop my tabletop in the 
Starbucks at 34th and Fifth.

You can’t paraphrase a poem or sculpt time 
to your preference, though you try. No. 
Deal with it on time’s terms, and daydream 
all you can while you can. 
 
The poetry attempt came out tongue-in-cheek. I don’t know if I like it. It doesn’t make my nipples hard. 

Noon
Tasty lunch of curried vegetable soup, salmon in a dill sauce, and couscous. Afterwards I cut a thick slice of the banana bread still sitting out from breakfast and sneaked it to my cell where I had my way with it. This was totally off my plan to forsake sugar. 

Our lunch monk played an audiobook of Thomas Merton’s No Man Is an Island (did I mention we eat in silence?). A woman across the table exchanged raised eyebrows with me at some of the nonsense coming out of Merton’s mouth. When we got up from the table and started the clean-up, I whispered to her my opinion that Merton is overrated because people don’t understand half of what he’s saying so they think he must be brilliant. But royalties from his dozens of books are bringing in a lot of revenue for the Trappists. This woman and I have formed a tacit bond because we teamed yesterday over washing the lunch dishes. Or it could be just the kavorka acting up again. It’s such a burden.

Between the banana bread and surreptitiously talking to the woman when we are supposed to maintain silence, I’ve been my usual naughty and obstreperous self. Or, as my wife used to say, “such a boy.”

Good Friday Mass will be at 3pm, the hour Christ died on the cross. Compared to yesterday’s schedule, they’ve left an extra hour for this Mass before supper at 6pm. I think this service is going to be a marathon. I’d better use the bathroom before heading over to the church. Until then, I’ll meditate on "Lamentations" to make up for my lunchtime failings.

7:00pm
Yup, I was right. It was more than a Mass. It was a Good Friday service. Two hours on the nose. And the Latins make fun of Ukrainian liturgies that often last two hours.

What was ridiculous was the guy who came into the church last minute and plopped himself in front of me. For this Good Friday service the monastery church is open to local residents. So it was pretty crowded. This guy had to be 6’5”. The bigger distraction was the sweat shirt he wore – to attend Good Friday in a monastery. On the back was silk-screened this stupid phrase: "To the person behind me, the world is a better place with you in it. Love, the person in front of you." I had this in my face for two hours.

Supper made up for it: New England clam chowder (my fav) and spinach pie. Both excellent.

Lights out at 8pm. Just like at home.


April 4, Holy Saturday

8:00am
I’m having a difficult time sleeping here because the bed is too soft, it’s up against the wall, and it’s twin size. The temperature is either too hot or too cold. The blanket and bedspread make me skeev. So I woke almost every hour and at one o’clock I was awake till almost three. As a result, when I did fall asleep I slept through Vigils at 3:30. But I woke in time for Lauds at 6:40. It really makes no difference because as lovely as the sound of the monks’ Gregorian Chant, I can’t understand a word of what they’re saying, even though it’s English.

Breakfast followed, with a continuation of Thomas Merton’s No Man Is an Island. He sounds so dated, talking about gin and cigarettes and “man” this and “man” that. 

Today I can no longer stand Tall Boy. That’s the name I’ve given to a young man, maybe twenty-ish, who is about eight feet tall. He might be a seminarian, attending on his own. He has sat across from me at two meals, now, and I can’t help but observe his preposterous feeding. Last night, for instance, he had a second helping of roasted potatoes along with the spinach pie, followed by a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This morning he scarfed two PB sandwiches and two slices of breakfast cake. I, on the other hand, had chilled eggs and dry, untoasted whole wheat bread. He has no belly. He’s just metabolism on steroids as I was at his age. What did me in, though, was in the silence after we finished eating and were waiting for the monk to offer a concluding prayer, he sat there slurping his coffee. Another slurper! The thing is, it’s so awkward to sit directly across from someone without conversation. You don’t know where to look. In most refectories I’ve seen, people sit on one side of a long table, not across from one another.

Holy Saturday is a time to think about Christ dead in his tomb. So everything essentially stops. Even the bell doesn’t ring today to call us to prayer. A monk will hear confessions at 9:30, and the only community service will be Vespers at 5:40. But we get up tomorrow morning about 2:30 for the solemn Easter Mass at 3am.

2:30pm
This is how it happens. You change your routine for a few days or a week. Go somewhere far from home. Mix with people you don’t know but with whom you share certain values and worldviews. And you start to make resolutions to change the way you’ve been conducting yourself.

In my case, it’s the new-found time I have here to just be. No deadlines, nothing to prepare, no next meal to shop for or prepare. And I’m resolved to bring this gift of time home with me. My immediate idea – to dedicate much of my afternoons to just be. To read. To think. 

5:40pm
When I visited the gift shop earlier this afternoon I found an anthology of poetry by Christian Americans. At the 5:40 Vespers, the thought came to my wandering mind that I should restrict my teaching to healing poetry, not poetry as prayer. What I can and should do is a unit on how to apply or write poems as prayer. This makes a lot more sense to me, and is more in keeping with what I am academically qualified to teach.


April 5, Easter Sunday

9:45am
Vigil Mass at 3am lasted until 5:45. Quite the affair. A blazing fire in their walk-in fireplace, a candle-lit procession, close to ten scripture readings and some nice singing by the monks. I skipped Lauds in favor of a chair doze.

Breakfast following Lauds sucked. Cold eggs, cold butter, stale bread. I am tempted to leave for home now, skipping their luncheon “Easter feast,” and beating the forecasted heavy rain. But I won’t, even though I’m already packed. 

My anger caused me to start “working” again – tinkering with my script for the healing poetry program I will lead at Wisdom House all day Friday. But I was able to stop by reminding myself I‘m not here to work, but to BE. So I’m returning to this journal to try to make some sense of the past three days of living like a monk.  

So . . . 

1. I’ve already written about my new perspective on time. Yesterday I wrote a new version (the 200th?) of my daily routine, this one to make room to be.

2. I’ve been reading The Christian Poetry in America poems and was reminded to write more metaphor into my poems. And more story. Many of the anthologized poems are so expository! 

3. I think, too, that I’m finished with Facebook and with news. They just upset me. Facebook was originally supposed to connect me to friends. No longer. It’s one advertisement or falsity after another, with hardly any friend posts at all. There is very little going on in the world day-to-day that I need to know in order to live my life.

I attended my second Mass of the day at 11am. The 3am Mass was a “vigil” marking the night Christ actually walked out of his tomb, while the 11am Mass celebrates Resurrection Day. 

And I’m glad I stayed for lunch. We're allowed to talk, now, and I sat with Mike, the volunteer who took care of us retreatants today. Turns out his wife has cancer, and writes some poetry. When I arrived back home Sunday afternoon I sent her an email inviting her to join my merry band of Wednesday Zoomshop “trauma poets.”