Annual Retreat

This year, our annual retreat was given by Mother Lucia Kuppens, OSB of the Abbey of Regina Laudis.

Over her protestations that she had never given a retreat outside her community, we suggested she might just share with us her lived experience of the Rule of St Benedict, and perhaps throw in some Shakespeare - a great love of hers.  She took up the challenge, and the result was a deeply meaningful journy through the Seven Ages of Man, seen through the prism of human development in monastic life.

Shakespeare's play, As You like It, features the character Jaques, a rather cynical commentator, who is musing, largely for his own entertainment, on the span of man’s life and famously breaks it down into Seven Ages:

"All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."
AS YOU LIKE IT, II, vii

Mother Lucia comments: "In case you are panicking about going from the mewling and puking infant to the trials of second childhood so pleasantly described,  I want to emphasize that Shakespeare’s seven ages are useful to us not because they offer immediate spiritual insight but precisely because they paint a picture of the futility of the life of man without a transcendent  dimension to lift him out of his unenhanced human condition. He is left to appear as the 'bare forked animal' King Lear comes to see, when all pretenses of the false self are stripped away. Curiously, though, I believe by staring at these ironic, satirical images, and really taking them in, the opposite begins to emerge, as an afterimage always does.  By staring at something red long enough you close your eyes and see green. One can find oneself laughing at these images as one does when something is reduced to its essential absurdity, and then suddenly become aware  that there is so much more to be considered, enjoyed, marveled at.  That is the genius of Shakespeare, to lead us to a truth by indirection, letting us discover a truth rather than being taught it."

Mother Lucia took these seven ages as the basis of her own musing on growth in monastic personhood.  Each age, the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the slipper'd pantaloon and the old man can be explored as a necessary stage of growth, with its characteristic gifts and temptations.  We pass through all of them on our journey to God, and we skip stages, or try to linger in one, at our peril.  The Rule of St Benedict, as a time-tried program for forming persons into who they were created to be by God, takes seriously the "raw material of the human person as uniquely created by God, body, mind, and spirit,  the whole imperfect, glorious enigma."  Shakespeare, writing a thousand years later, is deeply engaged with the human person in development toward wholeness.   "Our understanding of what constitutes the human person, at least in the Western tradition, comes to us largely through Shakespeare and the astounding array of diverse, complex, fully realized characters he invented."

In the course of our journey through the seven ages, Mother Lucia proved herself an able and wise guide, drawing upon human sensitivity, monastic depth and a profoundly moving insight into the beauty and necessary suffering on the path to becoming the mature, free and loving persons we are called by God to be.

Here is our community with Mother Lucia on the last day of retreat: