How to make an omelette

When the wife felt unwell and needed a rub, we asked our regular masseuse for the customary late-night home service. Because the whole procedure took three hours, and the wife could fall asleep, I decided to stay up and wait for the masseuse to finish. The woman had to be paid her fees and the gate and main door locked after her. It would be midnight.

Usually I go to bed before the wife, who always finds something to do before hitting the sack, such as clear my clutter, put the books back in place, cap the toothpaste tube and wash the smudged water glass left a third full on a book shelf. But that night, she would forgo this, yield to the soporific hands of the woman and sleep like a log – and leave me standing. I resolved to sit and make a twine rosary.

I learned how to make a twine or cord rosary not too long ago. With three hours to spare I chose this – not a book or the TV, either of which would have sent me snoring in a matter of minutes. And so I got myself a 20-foot-long piece of twine, held its middle part, loosely wound the twine once around the index finger, and lightly wound it again three times to form an x with the first loop, gently moved the loops out of the finger, passed the end of the twine through the loops, and pulled the twine all the way through until the loops shrank into a knot. This was the first of the ten Hail Mary’s of the third mystery. After each mystery, I made an Our Father with a bigger knot, five loops, until I finished the five mysteries and the center knot and the initial Our Father, three Hail Mary’s and the Our Father of the first mystery. When I finished the cross – the last item – it was midnight.

At no time did my attention flag. The loops engaged my mind and my fingers, which made sure that they stayed aligned and did not criss-cross. Each time I made a knot, I repeated the greeting that Elizabeth and the angel gave to Mary – the Hail Mary – and, as may be the case, the Our Father, the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples.

Thus preoccupied, I did not notice the passage of time. I had kept watch for three hours. If Jesus came during that time, he would find me awake, if not geared up for glory.

“Blessed are those servants, whom the lord will find watching when he comes… for the Son of Man is coming in an hour that you don’t expect him,” Jesus said.

Imagination, thoughts, emotions, desires – they flow through me like a river, unbidden, unstoppable (because the more I strive to stop them the more they come and bother me). An Arab saying suggests the way to deal with them – the dogs bark but the caravan moves on.

The author Richard Temple writes about the Byzantine fathers, and their advice that one use attention as an instrument to guard one’s inner peace against the mind’s endless distractions.

The mystics of the east recommend the Jesus Prayer as a way of keeping attention. In J. D. Salinger’s novel “Franny and Zooey,” Franny Glass discovers the prayer, which consists of continuously repeating the name of Jesus, in particular the words, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” This, Franny tells her boyfriend, allows one “to see God.”

Another method of acquiring the discipline of attention is manual labor, and this – when I made the cord or rosary – I found most effective. It asked for no less than my full focus and concentration. It helped that at the same time I knew that the work I was doing was in aid of prayer, if not a prayer in itself.

To be vigilant is to pray at all times, to live on two levels of being – the level of activity and the level of prayer – in the manner of Brother Lawrence, a 17th-century Carmelite monk, who, as he told a friend, flipped his little omelette in the frying pan — for the love of God.