It’s time!! Go!
I’ve been restless, irritable, uneven of soul. It’s not the virus or hermetic ways, not even the bombardment online of a million glamorous offerings to deepen everything from your spirituality to your drain pipe flow. Something was missing. What?
RETREAT! It’s been over two years since we’d been on retreat—out of town to a quiet place of contemplative solitude-in-community where you make friends with yourself and your God.
What is contemplative about Zoomed distance watching? Still, I need for my nerves a retreat, darling. So we sign up for a retreat, Compassiontide, at Holy Cross Monastery with Martin Smith, our favorite ex-monastic-now-married Episcopal monk-priest.
Retreat Silence
An infuriating irony about retreat silence: the more you concentrate your focus outward on icons, images sculpture, artwork, natural scenery, a speaker, the more your inner focus sharpens.
Retreat prep
I re-read Martin Smith’s Lenten classic A Season for the Spirit. I noticed the noble dedication by the then Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie who commissioned a book for Lent, 1991. “It still comes as a surprise to many people that there are monks and nuns who belong to the churches of the Anglican Communion. . . . This book is not a substitute for prayer itself. Instead it leads us into the experience of prayer. . . . Martin Smith has written a practical book. . . . I have much confidence that it will be found a rich quarry for Christians of varying traditions seeking to come closer to God in prayer, and also for those just beginning the journey of faith.”
I have so many underlinings in this little book that it makes me laugh. I’ve internalized it and now imagine it to be my own clever theology. There really is nothing new under the sun. Good!
Typos
I notice with a laugh that on pages 12 and 21 there are typos—the same word misspelled twice: INdentification.
In the chapter, “The Wind In The Wilderness,” Martin Smith describes the biblical story of Jesus being driven into the wilderness by the Spirit to discern his vocation. How could, or would, Jesus be human and divine at once? “If he is the Holy One of God, the Only-begotten, what becomes of his sense of INdentification with weak mortals?”
In the chapter, “The Anaesthetic Begins To Wear Off,” Jesus wrestles with how to reconcile a broken world into the divine embrace of God. “The Spirit of Jesus moves us, as it moved him, to INdentify ourselves with a broken world AND to bring it within the reconciling embrace of God.”
I will INdentify. Honestly, I slip-slide around, flop to one side or the other, and pray a lot to keep balance and be compassionate with my blundering. I’m a failure. But I’m awake. I go for more.
Retreat Meditations In Small Bits
God is an Overflowing Never-ending Immensity of Compassion—a Niagara. We can resonate with this flow, as a piece of paper lying on the strings inside a piano would when that note is twanged. The paper suddenly rises with the vibration. That’s how we RESONATE with divine Compassion—seeking more. The MORE is always available. I go with the flow.
The mystical password to enter the Gospel Mystery is ADORATION, not obedience. Adoration is loving God with the brakes off. A brain-damaged child would butt his head on the TV screen. He was aroused and gestured that he wanted MORE. He wanted IN, into the action. How adore-able. Me too!
Christianity is the only religion that puts passion back into compassion. Our God suffers. The hands that hold us in existence are pierced with unimaginable nails. The Cross, therefore, is a judgment, not because it is violent, but because it brings human cruelty into the light. I see! One of Jesus’s hand on my home altar crucifix is missing. I cover its absence with a tiny white shell. I shiver.
Martin has a small lamb tattooed on the inside of his arm. “The Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world; the sins of the world do not take away the Lamb.” I see that silly lamb with new eyes—no longer ridiculing but with gently tenderness.
Compassion for others is an unstable idea. What? Justice is very popular for good reason today, but it is not the Gospel of Christ. What? Justice offers equality, giving all of us just what we all, by rights, deserve. Mercy, however, is not just. It gives us all what we do not deserve, have not earned. Say again? Consider the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. Some worked hard all day, and some worked an hour only. They all got the same pay. Equal pay for equal work? Nope, not the way of God.
When you are helpless establish a sheltering heart in prayer. I pray with a young man of 25 whose acquaintance I have only recently made through his grandmother. He had a normal accident for a teenager who at 17 climbed a tree, lost balance, and fell to the hard ground—flat on his back. He is now 25 and quadriplegic. His grandmother left the church long ago, in disgust about rules that hurt people. I’d told her I was going on a retreat—virtually. We laughed. She knew what a retreat was, and the next day asked me if I’d pray for her grandson on my retreat. I do. I am. No brakes on.
Practice promiscuous empathy. OK, I’ve tried promiscuity in other ways, but this is much harder. Screech go my brakes. They still work—in case.
The Holy Spirit invites compassionate experimentation: Try this. See this. Ask this. Wonder this. Pray this. The Spirit tugs gently at your heart and gives it clues. For example, imagine that the person whose behavior you deplore may have an unhealed wound hiding behind mean behavior. In prayer, recall your own wounds, and Compassion will soften your heart. That’s God—madly soft-hearted.
Last Laughs
I asked my usual question about the lumbering pace of the Church in eliminating gendered language to find a more expansive and compassionate vocabulary for God. Martin grinned and said he knew who had asked that question. I’m that much of a pest, yes. He said he was not adept in this area, offered “Loving Parent,” and admitted that, although Church rhetoric is hard-edged to change, it is still locked into a masculine distanced God. (He didn’t add white. I forgave him immediately.) After all, most of the quotes and images he used were from women.
Hilarious irony: the theological language question about which I am the most passionate, I have never prayed about, never directly consulted God in prayer about. Have I assumed that God already agreed with me? Oh God, forgive me and help the Church loosen up and change traditional theological imagery. Thanks.
