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Her name was Sister Mary Benigna, a Roman Catholic nun who taught in a parochial school many years ago. She became a profound influence in my life when I was in the fourth grade. For two years I attended Sacred Heart School in Davenport, Iowa. Sister Mary Benigna was a slender young nun robed in a long black habit, and a starched square of white linen framed her face with her head covered by a long black veil. Swinging from her tiny waist hung a long brown-beaded rosary. She taught her class in a gentle yet firm way, gaining the respect of my classmates.

For some reason she took a liking to me, and I adored her. This incident I will remember   forever and has made me regard praise and worship of the Lord in a new and totally different way. Her relationship to Jesus was the most personal one I had ever encountered. One afternoon in the spring of the year she took me aside into a private room to talk to me for only a few moments. What she said struck a lasting chord in my spirit, and I realize the lasting effect our words can have.

  “Are you having a good trip with your grandmother?” was a question often put to me when I traveled with my mother.  Her hair had turned white in her forties and in those days women accepted their white hair. At least in our locale they did- and they often accepted babies late in life as well.  But still we looked, to much of the world, like a grandmother and granddaughter traveling together. 

The question bothered me a little because it told me that we didn’t look the way a mother and daughter should look. The polite grown-ups who asked seemed wise so they must be right. We must be different.

But if they looked past the white hair they would have seen the youthful sparkle in my mother’s dark eyes- the eyes that flashed at me from behind a tree when we played hide and seek and made me happy just to be alive.

It is a summer morning and I am seven or eight years old, skinny as a sapling and as lithe as, well, a skinny seven or eight year old.  Halfway up a silver maple tree in our front yard, I pause. The wind is coming up. It is a moment of grace, and I feel the arrival of a weather front like a secret just for me. I turn my face into the wind and close my eyes, and the cool air washes over me. The tree begins to creak and sway.  It is exhilarating …..for a minute. Then the swaying becomes more violent. I know I ought to climb down, but that means letting go of branches and trying to keep my balance along the way. Instead I cling like Saran Wrap to that tree trunk and start praying—and shouting—for help.

Fast forward many years. It is a Sunday morning in early summer. I am at a Sunday service, with sunlight streaming through the windows and spilling over a cool wood floor.  There is a small group of people with me at this Buddhist monastery, 20 or so others, all in our socks or bare feet. There is a sequence of group chants and responses that I cannot understand but can sound out, which somehow feels a little familiar. Then, an interesting talk by the abbot. Again, there is a comfortable feeling.

More chanting. We rise now from the floor and walk silently, in prayer or meditation, depending on our need. We move single-file in a silent line, out of the room on one side, down a hallway, and back into the room again. Ten times, 20 times, I don’t recall. This is the Walking Meditation.