On Mission to Interior Margins
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July 22, 2018“Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.” (Mk 6:31)
I find today’s gospel most appropriate, since this week has been our annual community retreat. Pondering this verse all week, however, I have not been able to separate it from last Sunday’s gospel, the other bookend to our retreat:
“Jesus summoned the Twelve and began to send them out two by two and gave them authority over unclean spirits. He instructed them to take nothing for the journey but a walking stick—no food, no sack, no money in their belts. They were, however, to wear sandals but not a second tunic.” (Mk 6:7-9)
Two questions occur:
1) What has this sending forth in mission to do with cloistered contemplatives, who by virtue of their charism, stay home?
2) What sense does it make for contemplatives to have an annual retreat, given that their whole lives are lived in retreat from the world and in restful prayer?
In our monastery, being on retreat means that we have much less work and more flexibility in the schedule, with midday prayer and the main meal at each sister’s discretion. The effect of this is to create wide open spaces of time in which we can move freely in response to the Spirit’s guidance. There is opportunity for long walks or long naps, long prayers or equally long distractions. In other words, where there is greater possibility, there is also greater responsibility. While the rhythm and structure of our ordinary life, with its regular choral offices and periods of manual labor, serve as a guide or trellis for the young plant of our spiritual life, during this week we set aside some of that for a more intense taste of the inner desert.
The desert place into which we enter, or better, are sent, is that of our own hearts. This is truly virgin territory, uncharted, sometimes unfriendly, and wild in its beauty. Jesus sends each one of us on mission into this place, with the authority over unclean spirits that our baptism provides; with the walking stick of discretion to feel out unknown dangers and find a firm spot to place our foot; and with sandals that protect us from harm as prudence does. But we take no food, no sack, no money: no securities beyond the essential, nothing to blunt the demands of the desert. One could also say: no to-do list, no required reading, no plan B and most importantly, no expectations. Since it is God’s domain we have entered and seek to inhabit, our plans do not apply.
Certainly all this is in continuity with our vocation as contemplatives; the desert is an integral part of our spirituality. But being on retreat means piercing deeper than the daily routine, which is always in danger of becoming mindless. It means being reminded of what our life is about, so as to plumb the depths of our particular call and mission in the Church more intensely and intentionally. Pope Francis has emphasized the missionary identity of the Church especially in terms of the call to the margins. What does this mean for contemplatives? Two excerpts from a talk given at last year’s General Chapter by Dom Gerard of Genesee Abbey shed some light:
“Constitution 3 speaks of our life as ordinary, obscure and laborious. In contrast to congregations with specific missions, we seem to have none. There is no explicit specialization that justifies our place in the world of good works in contrast to the mission of the Jesuits or the Dominicans. The void, the space in this case is living for no explicit purpose in the world. And this space discloses God as the hidden and secret purpose of our lives. If we had a specific mission, the disclosure of God in our form of life would somehow be ambiguous. The lack of a specific mission discloses clearly that God alone could be the secret purpose of life that is ordinary, obscure and laborious.”
“Pope Francis has asked us to move to the peripheries. We must see this call within the shape of our conversatio. Our very life constrained and shaped by solitude moves us swiftly to the peripheries where sub personal forces must be confronted with the armor of faith and hope. For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens. This spiritual combat is not just for ourselves but for the life of the world.”
The margins are not just out there, but also in here – those unevangelized areas of our lives and affections which can so easily be ignored as we go about our ordinary lives. I am invited, I am sent, to confront these aspects of my own life and my own heart. The silence and solitude of the desert provides ideal conditions for such an expedition. And if I am faithful to facing the inner margins, I believe those outer margins will be touched too, somehow.
“So they went off in the boat by themselves to a deserted place.” (Mk 6:32)
