Come Away for a While

“Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.” (Mk 6:31)

I dare say it is not too soon to be looking ahead to our community retreat, which begins in a little over a week.  Do we hear the voice of the Lord inviting us to a place of rest?  Sometimes I feel like I drive full speed ahead into the garage door of retreat, whereupon I fall into the arms of Jesus and gasp, “I think I got everything done!”  Perhaps this is not so different from the disciples’ experience.  No doubt Jesus understands.

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 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.  We come to the monastery in part because we want that support of others in a way of life oriented to the search for God.  We need this support to be the persons of prayer and service that we wish to be.  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 retreat we set aside some of that for a more intense taste of the inner desert.  Certainly, this is in continuity with our vocation; the desert is an integral part of our spirituality to be lived every day, not just on retreat.  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 us?  Two excerpts from a talk given at the last 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.”

The space opened up by living for no explicit purpose discloses God as the hidden and secret purpose of our lives.  Our Constitutions describe our life as: “wholly ordered to contemplation” and this is beautiful, though potentially misleading.   I have friends, even some apostolic religious, who seem to think that contemplatives don’t do much, laze around all day staring into the distance, and basically spend their whole lives as if on retreat.  I wonder how long any of us could stand it if this were the case!  Much as we look forward to retreat, most of us are more than ready when the day comes to resume our ordinary lives.  As St Benedict recognized, “Idleness is the enemy of the soul” and purposeful activity is key to shaping our lives according to the pattern of Christ, to say nothing of our mental health.  I learned some years ago that the original draft of the Constitutions submitted by the Order to the Vatican for approval contained a different phrase to describe our life: “wholly ordered to an experience of the Living God.”  Without rejecting the official version blessed by the Church, which places us within the family of contemplative orders, I find something very helpful in the original wording.  Our call is to experience God, to encounter Christ, in and through a life that is ordinary, obscure and laborious.  By no means does seeking God mean that we shouldn’t be busy, that we shouldn’t exert ourselves to serve the community in every way that we are asked, that we shouldn’t be responsive to the unexpected need of our sister that makes itself known even on a day of rest.  We only have to be alert that the starkness of our call to live for God alone in continual prayer does not degenerate into a more comfortable counterfeit, such as continual work or continual conversation.

Dom Gerard again takes up the pope’s call to the margins or peripheries:
“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 routine.  I am invited, I am sent, to confront these aspects of my own life and my own heart.  This deserted place into which we are sent 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.  If I am faithful to facing the inner margins, I believe those outer margins will be touched too.

“So they went off in the boat by themselves to a deserted place…. When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them” (Mk 6:32)

How do the inner and outer margins coincide?  How is it that we meet with a vast crowd in a deserted place?  We meet the multitude who crowd into our consecrated lives, that desert space deliberately emptied of worldly distractions and attachments.  We leave the world, only for the people of the world to come hastening in on foot to populate the space opened up by solitude and silence and the struggle for integrity.  There are faces and names, stories and situations which stand before our inner eyes like sheep without a shepherd.  Limited as we are, we cannot know every name, every face, every story or situation, but there are plenty that make their presence known in our consciousness, as if to say, “I am yours, tend me, care for me, feed me.”  We may sometimes wonder if there is room in us for all this.  With Moses we might cry out, “Was it I who conceived all this people? or was it I who gave them birth, that you tell me to carry them at my breast, like a nurse carrying an infant” (Num 10:11).  With the disciples we might object that we have nothing to give them to eat.  The more I empty myself before God, the more I am filled with this multitude.  And yet isn’t this exactly the point?  Here is the open space laid out for all humanity to take its rest, here the green grass covering the earth and making it ready for a picnic.