Thank you, Michael Galovic, peerless iconographer.

St. Brendan has been in my life for a long, long time now— four decades at least. I first made his acquaintance as a graduate student in Medieval Studies, when I took refuge in his Navigation Sancti Brendani as a swashbuckling relief to the innumerable Latin theological and devotional treatises I was at the time plowing my way through in pursuit of a Ph.D. That manuscript is the original medieval blockbuster. It’s an eighth-century account of a sixth-century monk who set out from Ireland in a leather boat to discover “the land promised to the saints.” His voyage over the seas with an equally swashbuckling monastic crew was so realistic that it led some to wonder whether it might possibly be describing an Irish landfall on North America eight hundred years (!!!) before Columbus. The realism of this possibility was confirmed in the 1960s when an adventurer by the name of Tim Severin meticulously recreated the journey recorded in the Navigatio (except for singing the psalms!) and actually made landfall on Newfoundland.

Over the years, St. Brendan has always been there in the backdrop of my life. I think it was through his doing, chiefly, that I decided to abandon an academic life in Pennsylvania for the wilds of Maine—the closest I could come, in my twenties, to the archetype of a seafarin’ hermit life. About a decade later, synchronistically, I was invited to serve as vicar of a small, seafarin’ Episcopal parish named St. Brendan the Navigator (!) , in Stonington, Maine. Those years were some of the most memorable in my entire ministry. I used to sail over from my home on more-or-less nearby Swan’s Island (depending on which way and how strong the wind was blowing). One of our parishioners, quite the old salt himself, used to await my Sunday morning arrival with his binoculars trained keenly on the bay; when he could spot my little boat emerging out of the fogbanks, he gave a nod, and his wife started the water running in the tub.

One of the members of that parish was (and still is) and extraordinary graphics artist by name of Siri Beckman. To honor St. Brendan’s and its crazy seafarin’ lady hermit vicar, she designed the following print:

Some of you may recognize it as the logo of the Contemplative Society. Correct! Its seafaring theme and spunk (contemplation and action, indivisible), seemed just the ticket for our upstart little BC organization. Siri graciously gave her consent, and we adopted it in 2000. It has been with us ever since.

St. Brendan came with me to British Columbia in more ways than merely a stunning graphic. For most of 1995 I worked on creating my own liturgical drama based on the life of St. Brendan. It premiered it at All Saints, the Anglican parish of Salt Spring Island, in June 1996, with Captain Charles Hingston, a BC Ferries captain (as well as All Saints parishoner and fabulous undiscovered theatrical talent) as St. Brendan, and Lottie Devindisch, one of our charter Contemplative Society members, as his mysterious bird-guide. The Rt. Rev. Barry Valentine, retired All Saints rector and organist, took the role of Judas Isacariot  (as well as our musical coach and accompanist, something Judas himself never managed), and several of the All Saints vestry signed on as his crew. Needless to say, an uproarious time was had by all.

So the die was no doubt already cast by the hand of synchronicity that I would eventually cross paths with Michael Galovic, Serbian born, Australian-naturalized iconographer, whose remarkable repertory includes not only most of the traditional Russian Orthodox icons beautifully and energetically “written,” but also a few of a much more adventurous nature. I’m not sure that any of those great old Russian saints and staretsky had ever heard of St. Brendan, but Michael certainly had heard of him and rendered him with a wildness that went straight to my own seafaring heart. Don’t you just love the swirling sea? It’s Prospero and Brendan, all rolled into one.

I met Michael because—and yes, enter yet another hemisphere and continent to this wondrously global story—my extraordinary New Zealand friends decided to thank me for one of my teaching trips by commissioning a Mary Magdalene icon from Michael. It is NOLI ME TANGERE, one of the great treasures in the entire iconic visionary library, depicting Mary Magdalene and Jesus in their intimate encounter in the garden of the resurrection.

I brought Mary Magdalene home with me from my spring 2011 teaching trip, and she beautifully graces the altar in my Eagle Island hermitage. As part of the same outpouring, my NZ friends also gifted me with a beautiful catalogue of Michael Galovic’s work, and naturally, my eye was drawn to St. Brendan. I told myself, “if there’s ever a chance…if there’s ever a way…”

And so I am overjoyed, stunned—but not entirely surprised—that the occasion in question should prove to be the milestone of my 65th birthday. Through the incredible generosity of so many friends and supporters—and thanks as well to Michael Galovic as well, who “wrote” this icon at a cost barely enough to cover the “ink,” it has become a reality. I am deeply, deeply grateful.

“Old men ought to be explorers,” T. S. Eliot wrote in his The Four Quartets (I am assuming that “men” is in this case a gender-inclusive term). He continues:

Here and there does not matter. We must be still
And still moving, into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion…

And so, St. Brendan, you are still the master helmsman as I raise my sails and strike out into this “other intensity.” What a blessing!! What a crowning coupe de grace for this sabbatical year! To all who have helped, or been part of this wonderfully rich thread of my life— as actors, drawers of my bath, commissioning patrons, artists, or holders-of-the-space, THANK YOU! May we all take another step together on our journey to “the land promised to the saints.”

With blessings and gratitude, Cynthia

That yearning for intimacy runs through the marrow of everything, joining together the visible and invisible realms, everything we know of our own hearts with everything we know of the cosmic heart. Quarks, molecules, human relationships in all their messiness—everything reverberates with the big bang of God’s primordial yearning for self-communication, for a gravitational field of “knowing and being known.” That’s the profound mystical intuition the doctrine of the Trinity holds at its heart. Even the word “consciousness” begins with “con”—“with”; otherwise it’s just “sciousness” —omniscient, perhaps, but all locked up in itself.

The divine energetic flow is more like eros than agape, as mystics of all spiritual traditions have intuitively known. Its yearning is palpably felt in our own hearts, with an intensity almost more than we can bear. In fact, that’s precisely how one of Christianity’s greatest mystics, William Blake, expressed it: “We are here on earth a little while to learn to bear the beams of love.” That long over-idealized (and over-sanitized) agape, so often depicted as the primary nature of divine love, is not how the situation actually stands; agape is the Omega of Divine Love, not the Alpha. Once again the Trinity furnishes us with the template for understanding. It shows us how Love becomes quieted in itself, serenely flowing and gentled, as the eros that originally called it into being is gently, patiently subjected to kenosis, or “letting go.” Person by Person, Love simply empties itself into the Other. Not a renunciation, not a pushing away, but a gentle loosening of the grip on entitlement and insistence, so that eventually, in the turning of the wheel—(as the poet T.S. Eliot envisioned it):

…the tongues of flame are in-folded
into the crowned knot of fire,
and the fire and the rose are one.

I see this almost as a divine alchemical formula: A=Ek, in which A stands for agape, E for eros, and k for kenosis. It is the immutable law of the transformation of love, and it is the purpose to which everything on heaven and earth is bent. Ah, but at what cost!

“The presence of God is the absence of God,” my hermit teacher brother Raphael (Rafe) used to remind me. It was when he showed me how to turn the ache around, to experience it as God’s yearning for me rather than my yearning for God, that I eventually came to experience the ache itself as the tether connecting us: the homing beacon of God’s presence made manifest in the forcefield tugging at my heart.

You can do that with a human beloved as well. I learned that when Rafe died sixteen years ago, having promised me for three months beforehand that “nothing would be taken away” from the intimacy of our connection. Already during the last months of his life on earth, he had begun to prep me for this new mode of communication, training me how to sense his more subtle presence through the tether of yearning that joined together our two hermitages, a mile or so apart, in a single communion of hearts. Learning this skill while still in human flesh has helped me to rely on it much more confidently in these sixteen years now since his death, as our human intimacy has indeed continued uninterrupted, only now mediated through “the love that moves the sun and the stars.”

During the time of our human journey together—a far too short three and a half years, but evidently long enough for the lessons that had to be learned within it—I deeply resisted the standard celibate formulation that “our only real hunger is for God. No human being can fill that space.” Not only did that statement seem patently untrue (I knew very well whom it was I hungered for), it also seemed to have the dubious effect of turning God into an object, a suitor among other suitors, to whom saying “yes” required that I say “no” to a human beloved. That simply didn’t ring true with my experience of God, and I resisted having my flesh-and-blood of actual human intimacy so cavalierly spiritualized.

Nowadays I see the situation somewhat differently. What I’d say now is not that we “hunger for God,” but rather, that love is an infinite yearning within us, which cannot, precisely because of its infinite origin, be completely consumed or exhausted in the finite realm. It is, as I said, an echoing reverberation of that primordial “big bang” of God’s own yearning for intimacy, and so its ultimate trajectory will always be toward the infinite. It will eventually overleap its fragile human vessels and point directly, like a finger to the moon, toward Divine love. That does not mean we give up our human beloveds; but it does mean that Love will eventually tend to turn all our human encounters into “the bush that burns but is not consumed.” By its own internal dynamism it pushes toward what T.S. Eliot (again, in one of his Four Quartets) calls “another intensity,” where Agape-come-full will usher us into “a further union, a deeper communion.” Even in the most intense, passionate, “starcrossed lovers,” one-of-a-kind human relationship, the A=Ek principle still holds firm. It is only through widening space, letting go, deferring to the trajectory of Love itself, that human desiring will put on the wedding garments of eternity.

The great human love stories all ring with this alchemy, of course. That most magnificent of metaphysical poets, John Donne, wrote about it with brilliant clarity in his “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”:

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go endure not yet
a breach, but an expansion,
like gold to airy thinness beat.

What part of alchemy do you not understand?

But while the path of relationship with a human beloved is so often and authentically the gateway into divine love, the minefields are also real. It runs the risk of diverting the quest for divine intimacy into the search for the perfect partner—or worse yet, stalling out the whole process in despair or envy on the assumption that the only way to get into the ballpark in the grail quest for intimacy is if one first has first found a “somebody” to be intimate with.

Not the case! The single most astonishing discovery I have made in these decades now of spiritual journeying was put into words by Robert Sardello in his wonderful book Silence (Goldenstone Press, 2006). There I finally could claim the truth I had actually come to recognize in my own life of prayer: that intimacy is not simply a current flowing between two bodies; it is an intrinsic property of the human heart and can be experienced directly as such. Precisely because our hearts are holograms of the divine heart and reverberate in that same vibratory tether, we can come to know “pure intimacy” as a relational field verifiable within our own being. All it takes is that we learn to sit in the stillness of contemplative prayer and find our way into our own hearts through sensation—not through memory, emotional drama, or any of those other cataphatic faculties that ruffle the surface of the heart and disturb its perfectly mirroring capacities. And indeed, I had first became familiar with this bandwidth of pure intimacy through my long years of Centering prayer. But not until reading Sardello did I understand it for what it was; I simply recognized it as a certain “golden tenderness” that sometimes engulfed me in the nanoseconds between the thoughts.

Cosmic intimacy is the trousseau with which we come to this planet, the reverberating frequency through which we are able to realize all of this beautiful, holy, God-saturated universe as “the beloved.” It is hardwired into our hearts, so that we will always be able to find our way home. And so that God’s love can again and again come full and whole in the crucible of our human hearts.

This article was originally published in the current issue of Radical Grace, available through The Center for Action and Contemplation cacradicalgrace.org

“…With the anointing ceremony repositioned as the opening act in the Holy Week drama, the entire shape of Holy Week shifts subtly but decisively. In this reconfiguration the meaning of anointing is itself transformed. It emerges as the sacramental seal upon all our human passages through those things which would appear to destroy or separate us, but in fact draws us more deeply toward the heart of divine love.”

We long for that more than anything, don’t we? – that feeling of absolute security and safety in God. We long for it in this world and hope for it in the next. We long for the deep inner knowing that, as Lady Julian of Norwich says, “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”: to know that everything is going to be all right. Scripture says it will: “Since this One has been raised up, there is also a universal resurrection of the dead ”.  But no matter how many words we hear, whether from Jesus, our church ministers, or our friends, we’re so often still afraid.

What are we afraid of? Our writer says it is that feeling of nothingness – of having to let go of “everything I thought was me”.  What is this “everything I thought was me”? Well It’s my personality, my likes and dislikes, my opinions, my hopes, my fears, my expectations, my desires, my feelings, my sense perceptions, my memories, my moment-by-moment thoughts. There’s a lot of “me” there isn’t there? But there’s nothing wrong with all of those “me’s”. They’re an essential and indeed precious part of who we are – a cause for celebration, just as are our ancestries, astrological signs, Enneagram types, families-of-origin, marriages and other relationships, and all the rest of the bundle of things that constitute a human life. Finally though, they are more characteristics that we have than the essence which we are. They are more “I have” than “I am”. And as wonderful as they are they in themselves will pass away when we die. But there is another part of us, beyond all of these “me’s”, – beyond our smaller selves – that will not die.

In Richard Rohr’s words who we really are, and what will not die, is “the treasure and freedom … which is revealed in the joy and glory of the Risen Christ”. That treasure and freedom lies in the core of our beings, deeper than any of our smaller selves’ manifestations. It has been given many names: our True Self, our Essential Self, our Deep Self. My own preference is our Christ Self. It is unique to each of us. It is the glory of God within us. It is where Christ encounters the distinct human being that is each of us. It is where we have a personal experience of the One, of God. It is a relational space where we experience ourselves as loved – where we are met in tenderness and compassion. It is a part of the immensity that Christians call the Body of Christ while also being, in some mysterious fashion that very same Christ that Jesus broke forth in his birth, death and resurrection. And it cannot be destroyed.

To me the most wonderful and amazing thing about that Christ Self within me is that it can be both known and grown. It is accessible and dynamic. It is something that I have been entrusted with in order to have it, in Mary’s words, “magnify the glory of the Lord” – both in this world and the next. Mary uses the word “soul” to describe this Christ Self: “My soul magnifies the glory of the Lord”.  And that is another word we can use in describing this “treasure and freedom revealed in the Risen Christ”. It is a soul that is not static but is continually moving, continually growing (and, because we are human, sometimes receding). This soul, this Christ Self, is formed as we learn and distill the essence from all of the feelings, sensations, thoughts and experiences of our lives. What we are about in this world, in preparation for our movement into the next, is the building up of this soul. Personally I like to think of this Christ Self as my “second body”.  It’s what Paul is speaking of when he writes of becoming a “new creation, a new being in Christ”. It’s that place within which Jesus called the “Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven”. It’s that place that scripture is referring to when it says we are made “in the image and likeness of God”. It‘s where God comes bursting towards, in, and through us. And it is this soul, this second body, this new creation, this Christ Self that will carry us into life beyond death.

I lived much of my life as the “doubting Thomas” of yore. But I like to remind myself that it was Thomas that actually had more faith than perhaps any of the others. It was he after all who was willing to die when Jesus was about to return to Judea to waken his friend Lazarus. Thomas said then, granted with a bleak resignation, “Let us go also, that we may die with him.”  Let us put aside our fears and follow Thomas – and when the time for our death arrives may we say the same last words that the monk Bede Griffiths spoke on his deathbed: “Receive the growing Christ”.

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Brian Puida Mitchell has been on the “spiritual” path all of his life – albeit somewhat grudgingly for a good number of years. He jumped in with both feet fifteen years ago after being introduced to Centering Prayer by Cynthia Bourgeault and now facilitates a contemplative group in Kamloops, B.C.

Wake up!  That’s the root note in the chord of Lent. It is no accident that in the northern hemisphere, where the church calendar originated, it is also the time of spring.  New life is waking from its winter death, the sun’s strength returns, and the natural world begins to vibrate more and more.

But waking from unconsciousness has always been a tricky adventure.  For, the very tools and practices we use to wake up often begin to seem like the end in themselves.  Traditionally, the time of Lent is a time for praying more, indulging our appetites less, and confessing our sins.  It is coloured by a sombre, restrained tone.  The practices we adopt, the fasts we observe, the letting go we do, can very easily become our focus rather than the intention of becoming more awake.  In the Old Testament reading for Ash Wednesday we hear Isaiah (Chapter 58) exhorting his people to realize that it is waking up to relationship with the Eternal, aligning with the energy of mercy and compassion and joy, rather than any prescribed action that is the true goal of the fast.

Fasting is sometimes much easier than waking up.  Lent or not, all of our practices must be tempered by the constant reminder that the practice itself is not the goal.  One of my favourite illustrations of this is a story from the Snowmass Conference as it was related to me by one of its participants.  With the leadership of Fr. Thomas Keating, the Trappist monk, since the 1980s these conferences have brought together leading practitioners and great minds from many different spiritual paths to share dialogue and explore points of convergence.  One year, the group was intent on releasing a statement about what they could agree on as a group in terms of spiritual practice.  After much discussion they agreed that they could agree to a statement that each tradition found a practice of intentional silence (i.e. Meditation) to be integral to the spiritual journey.  But one participant had another point of view and chose that moment to speak up.  Roger LaBorde, who represented no spiritual community and who joined the conferences along with his teacher Gerald Red Elk, said the following:

 Meditation is something you all do to kill time before you decide to wake up!

Gasp.

Roger’s gift, of course, is to play the trickster, the clown who jars us out of our complacency.  His insight is not that meditation is a waste of time but that it is only useful if it is employed as part of a larger intention to be awake.  Fasting, prayer, liturgy, or anything at all can become a barrier if we lose sight of what our larger vision of wakefulness is.  Perhaps this is one reason why Jesus did not write anything down or give his disciples a revolutionary, effective spiritual practice to focus on.  He knew that human beings love to try and concretize and possess and control the means of our salvation, which is one of the code words in Christianity for awakening.  He also knew, maybe because he loved the prophet Isaiah’s writings so much, that as soon as we succeed in concretizing, possessing or controlling then the icon that beckons us forward becomes simply a mirror that leads us nowhere.

And so we are led, in Lent, to liminal space.  For, as embodied spirits in our experience of space and time we must use symbol, story and metaphor, poetry, prose and song, as tools and vehicles on the journey toward the One.  On the path of awakening, the path of “ascension”, we learn to use these symbols as tools rather than as idols, as guides rather than as Gods.  The paradox is, of course, that we cannot abandon them too soon for it is in working with the “not yet,” the world of symbol, that we are prepared for the “already”, the world beyond form.

There are two notes in the Lenten chord that seem to be particularly well suited to our journey of waking up.  On Ash Wednesday in the Christian tradition, as our foreheads are marked with ash, we hear the words spoken: Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.  We will die.  Nothing in this world of space and time is permanent.  Everything is passing away.  The reality of death has always been a key component in the ritualization intended to bring us into greater awareness.  Initiation into the sacred mysteries of every culture involves some sort of ritual death, a stark reminder that the only thing there is to choose is life in the present moment.

One place this process of initiation is preserved in our technological, post-modern Western world is in the 12 Step movement.  In particular, Step Four:  Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.  With the help of this guidepost, millions of people have become more and more awake to themselves, more and more healed and whole.  The insight captured by this remarkably inspired movement can also be found in the more dusty recesses of the Christian tradition.  The tone of Step Four  is the reason why Lent has traditionally been a season of self-examination, confession and penitence.  When we make a searching and fearless moral inventory we must enter death.  We must die to the person we think we are, that we pretend to be, that we wish we were, the masks we present to the world.  Through this death we can come to new life, to a new state of wakefulness as we cast off the illusion of past and present and enter more fully into the eternal moment that is before us.

May we all observe a Holy Lent!

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Ernest Morrow is an Anglican Priest, Montessori teacher, wilderness program instructor, music leader, philosopher and faithful servant of the Lord. Ernest directs the Community of the Reconciliation and serves in a half-time position as Assistant Priest at St. Philip Anglican Church in Victoria, BC. Ernest & his wife, Jeannie Achuff have one bright and busy toddler, Curzon.

In Darlene Franz’s workshop on Sacred Chant here in Victoria last November 19^th, she suggested something that made a deep impression on me. And for the life of me, I couldn’t pull it back, I couldn’t remember it. I could only feel it. Until… I read the above excerpt in the devotional God Calling last month.

While we were chanting, someone commented that they just couldn’t seem to get enough breath. What Darlene suggested to the group was to focus on the out-breath instead of on the in-breath. The in-breath is automatic. Only the out-breath, fully released, fully surrendered, allows the new breath to rush in. How like Centering Prayer, as we practice letting go, over and over, not knowing what will come next, but trusting and paying attention, and letting go instead of clinging, over and over and over again.

Darlene talked about playing a wind instrument. How much effort it takes to blow on the reed to make sound. And how because there’s more effort than air required, a musician may run out of oxygen before running out of air. In other words, the oxygen is used up even when there’s still air in the lungs. So counter to what feels the normal thing to do – breathe in – the clarinetist must exhale fully first before the new breath has room to rush in. The urge is to inhale before the ‘dead’ air is let go of.

How often to we forget to exhale and then try and force a new breath? If we can let go fully, the next breath comes rushing in without effort. Life rushes in to feed and embrace us. The cycle seamlessly continues. Until it doesn’t, which is something out of our control anyways.

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Selinde Krayenhoff is a writer, community worker, teacher/facilitator/keynote speaker, and past member of The Contemplative Society Board. Selinde is founding publisher of Island Parent Magazine and currently offers workshops and talks on
Nonviolent Communication, Parenting, and Midlife Transitions.

Darlene Franz, D.M.A., is a freelance oboist, singer, music educator, and chant composer residing in Seattle Washington. Darlene facilitates sacred chant workshops and assists at select Wisdom Schools in collaboration with the Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault

Two weeks into this winter hermit adventure, and I’ve already pretty much lost track of what day of the week this is, so at the moment I’m even more clueless than usual about when Ash Wednesday will arrive. Is it next week or the one following? All I know is that at some point in the foreseeable future it will be arriving and the liturgical mood of the church will shift accordingly. Those changes are pretty much irrelevant out here in hermit land. Through seasons of rejoicing and seasons of fasting I still chop wood and lug water (today, with the temperatures well below 0 on either fahrenheit or celsius scale, it’s more like lug wood and chop water.)

But oh, what a stark beauty she is today, with winds whistling down from the northwest, turning the bay a deep winter blue-green topped with seasmoke—and the snow diamonds sparkling everywhere from last night’s dusting! I’d happily sign up for several more lifetimes of this.

But I know that whenever it may be, Lent is just around the corner, and with that temporal reality in mind I’d like to call your attention to a couple of resources floating around out there for your Lenten study and perhaps Holy Week contemplative celebration.

My Contemplative Liturgies for Holy Week booklet is available for cheap ($15, I believe) from the Episcopal Housel of Prayer in Collegeville, Minnesota. These liturgies were created expressly for our pilot Holy Week silent immersion retreat at the House of Prayer two years ago, and they follow the contemplative format we’ve been fine-tuning around and about the Wisdom School network, designed to rely heavily on repetitive (i.e., easily memorizable) contemplative chants and lots of silence so that only the worship leaders need a book before them. They are intended to fill out the complement of Holy Week services, creating a liturgy of absolution and ablution for Tuesday night and an anointing ceremony for Wednesday evening, prominently featuring Mary Magdalene and the Song of Songs. The intention is to make available simple contemplative liturgy that doesn’t interrupt the flow of the deepening contemplative stillness and that also underscores the experience of the Paschal Mystery as a sacramental pathway of Conscious Love.

“Place me as a seal upon your heart, for love is as strong as death,” proclaims the Song of Songs, and that is our understanding of the Mystery of the Passions set forth in these simple liturgies. You’ll find them appropriate for a Lenten study group, or even for contemplative re-enactment. A real plus is that the music is included as well. At last you’ll see the “score” for some of the well-known Wisdom “top forty” (such as “Slowly Blooms the Rose Within” and “All Shall Be Well”) and a few lovely newcomers as well.

You can order your copy at  www.ehouseofprayer.org; or email houseprayer@csbsju.edu; or phone 320-363-3293.

Incidentally, as of this writing (whatever day this may be!), there are still a few places available for our 2012 Holy Week silent retreat at the House of Prayer, and I’d love to welcome a few old and new friends from this Contemplative Society blogspot.

The other resource to call to you attention—much more discreetly hidden amongst the maze of downloadable e-files on the Church Publishing website (that’s the Episcopal Church in the USA). The website is www.churchpublishing.org; you can use the search field to enter “Bourgeault” and navigate your way to something called “A Solemn Liturgy of the Passion for Good Friday with a Biblical Passion Libretto.” (It’s also retrievable under the simpler title ST. HELENA LITURGY GOOD FRIDAY; in either case the ISBN number is 978-0-89869-561-8.) There you’ll find the libretto that I originally put together in 2003 for newly commissioned oratorio The Passion by Aspen composer Ray Vincent Adams. Sister Cintra Pemberton of the Order of St. Helena has taken this text and re-orchestrated it as a simple congregational liturgy suitable for performance on Good Friday en lieu of the stormy and polarized passion texts so often read on this solemn day. I think it’s around $25 for a downloadable file; again, I’d encourage you to look it up either for study in your contemplative group or Wisdom circle, or with an eye toward actual liturgical enactment on Good Friday. The text is culled from all four gospels, though it leans most heavily on the so-called Farewell Discourses in the Gospel of John. And its theme is once again, the Holy Week Mystery understood as a Sacrament of Conscious Love.

By the time Holy Week rolls around, my winter solitude will have long since ended, and I’ll be mostly back in the saddle with the usual round of retreats, Wisdom Schools, and this next year a lot of lectures). I will probably will be up to speed again on what day it is. It’s comforting to imagine myself transitioning between these two worlds through the beautiful gate of our upcoming Holy Week retreat. I can already see myself tucked in at the House of Prayer, living the Holy Week passage through its deeply contemplative interiority.

For today, it’s lug wood and chop water, and as I shut down the computer (my 20 minutes of daily air time are now over) and pull on my boots, my heart extends in gratitude and love to you all. This is, indeed, holy time…though not quite like any of the usual definitions of holiness. One poem I’ve always loved (Nancy Devine, “Do What You’re Doing”) puts it this way:

There’s nowhere else to be

when you no longer desire

to be where you’re not

So you must be free

when you no longer desire

You think

that sounds like

a Puritanical freedom

Oh no—no, no, no—

I don’t mean

don’t do what you want to do

I mean do what you want to do so well

that you don’t want

to do whatever you’re not doing.

Something like that. All blessings to you!

Cynthia

Well, the long-awaited time has at last arrived! After more than ten years in the planning and ground-laying, I have arrived back on Eagle Island for six weeks of winter solitude. Six weeks!!!  I have no official commitments until March 9. And while there will no doubt be trips ashore for groceries and errands, they will be at the dictates of time and tide, not crammed on either edge of a flight-to-somewhere-else that has to be risked, sometimes in marginal conditions, because “the show must go on.” If I’m content to live on macaroni and rice (with mussels gathered from the shore), even these provisioning trips may be few and far between.

Bob Quinn, our island boat captain, brought me ashore yesterday afternoon in a gathering easterly breeze and light snowfall. He drove the bow of his lobsterboat right up onto the beach, and in two quick passes of his dinghy we had groceries, cat, computer, suitcases, and the several canvas tote bags full of books and files that have accompanied me on the latest month-long roadtrip, all safely ashore and under cover at my little house before nightfall. Today, as snow turns to rain and the only sound is the steady drip-drip-drip from a leaky rain gutter overhead, I am tending my woodstove, lugging water from the well, and taking advantage of the still only nine hours of usable daylight to get as far as I can with the unpacking and sorting of mail and awaiting Christmas presents.

What now?  How to use this precious time? There are a billion projects awaiting my attention, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.  There’s the Trinity book to “git further” on. Three major lectures, two Wisdom Schools to prepare, and the inevitable flow of correspondence that still manages to pile up in the twenty minutes a day I can be online without crashing my solar system. (Please forgive me if it takes a bit longer to get around to questions and queries these next several weeks!) It would be easy to simply bury the time in the usual sort of busy-ness, or the semi-Dionysian frenzy I always disappear into when a major writing project has my full attention. To emerge six weeks later with check marks next to everything on my “to do” list and an organized calendar for the next two years: well, that would be an accomplishment of sorts, but not really what I’m most yearning for in this precious hermit window of opportunity.

What I’m most yearning for is also what I (typical human being that I am) most strenuously resist.

My hermit teacher Rafe always headed up the hill to his winter hermitage carrying neither telephone (let alone email!), a good book, nor a to-do list. Not even a watch (I gave him one for Christmas one year, but he managed to lose it in less than a week). Real hermiting, he insisted, is consecrated to emptiness, to deep inner listening. Even the usual contemplative piety of regularly-apportioned periods for prayer, meditation, lectio divina, was too much structure for him, too much imposition of a human scale  on the vast, cavernous spaciousness of silence. “You have to endure the tedium until something emerges in it,” he always told me (“in” it, not “from” it, he insisted). “It always takes me about four days to shift gears,” he added, intent that the real hermit’s work was not to do anything in particular, but simply to acclimate gradually to living in conscious fullness “at the intersection of the timeless with time.” It requires a steel-trap mind and a lot of patience—“enough being to be nothing” is how he put it. It is  a slowly gathering capacity to live inside one’s own skin, directly face to face with the sheer immensity of the now, without running off downwind into schedules, structures, prayers, accomplishments: all our human defenses against reality.

Rainbow over Eagle Island

Well, I can’t pretend that I’m going to do any of this particularly well. The lure to get busy is strong, and the worthy projects—and even fun ones, like finally learning a few more Bach inventions on the piano or cello, or reading through the pile of books that has been slowly accumulating for all these ten years—is part of the time, too, all part of that “with time” part of that “intersection of the timeless with time” equation, and my own restless spirit will no doubt relieve itself with any number of these little monuments—not to mention cutting up all that dead and downed wood out in the south pasture and having that long-awaited winter bonfire. But being present even to my own restlessness is all part of being present, and I suspect that if I can just keep myself grounded in the gentle rhythm of human busyness and cosmic attending, I’ll come upon the right stride and pacing eventually…

…like the slow, steady rise and fall of the sea against the popplestones down on the shore, barely but always audible as the underlying pedal point when the wind drops down and the piano (and cello) fall silent. One thing I know, this precious, magic time will be over in the blink of an eye. And I’m curious who will emerge on the other side of it.

With love to you all, from the heart of God!

Cynthia

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October 21, 2011

“On a bright, sunny day you can set your course on a landfall five miles away from you and sail right to it. But in the fog, you make your way by paying close attention to all the things immediately around you: the deep roll of the sea swells as you enter open ocean, the pungent scent of spruce boughs, or the livelier tempos of the waves as you approach land. You find your way by being sensitively and sensuously connected to exactly where you are, by letting ‘here’ reach out and lead you. You will not learn that in the navigation courses, of course. But it is part of the local knowledge that all the fishermen and natives use to steer by. You know you belong to a place when you can find your way home by feel.”

A friend recently shared this passage from Episcopal priest Cynthia Bourgeault’s book Mystical Hope.  It is a lovely analogy describing the duality of consciousness that we can employ to chart a course to the same destination, yet experience the journey in entirely different manners. As Ms. Bourgeault further tells us,

“While egoic thinking is like sailing by reference to where you are not – by what is out there and up ahead – spiritual awareness is like navigating by reference to where you are. It is a way of “thinking” at a much more visceral level of yourself – responding to subtle intimations of presence too delicate to pick up at your normal level of awareness.”

It is navigating by reference to where you are in the moment, using less obvious cues to find your way, cues that, as she points out elsewhere, “emerge like a sea swell from the ground of your being once you relax and allow yourself to belong deeply to the picture.”

Applicable to so many aspects of my life, and such a good a metaphor for a sailor…

I have been thinking about this duality of approach in the context of my Board work. As a director, my key responsibility is to focus on the sight five miles out, which is natural for me as I am always seeking the “big picture,” and believe I can help pilot us toward our objective. Yet I also have this inclination to respond to what I believe I am sensing as the more detailed and subtle currents and patterns of the moment. When this happens, I need to remind myself that I am only sensing a small fraction of the real churning of the waters and the sudden shifts in the wind patterns. There is only one person that feels the fullness of the moment, and that is the real navigator — the CEO. When it comes to these “realities and intimations of the moment,” I have to remind myself that I am not the pilot now. I was once, and loved it. Now I am the coach; I am the teacher; I am the mentor. Not the captain. What I see is only a part of the canvas, maybe only the echoes of land we are about to touch rather than the full force of the trials and tribulations of the running of a business. This puts my “action orientation” to the test, requiring me to have faith that much good is happening and there is a very competent captain on board. It forces me to step fully into the “unknown.” And even though I dedicated a full chapter to this practice in my book, I am still learning to be comfortable there. It teaches me to be humble, remaining present even in the fog. Hopefully I will also add at times some of my wisdom to seeing subtleties in the fog that may be missed by others.

The Bourgeault passages that my friend shared inspired me to read the entire book, and in it I discovered a depth that is only hinted at in the sailing metaphor. Here is a sampling:

“…I saw how time – all our times – are contained in something bigger: a space that is none other than Mercy itself. The fullness (or ‘end’) of time becomes this space: a vast, gentle wilderness in which all possible outcomes – all our little histories, past, present, and future; all our hopes and dreams – are already contained and, mysteriously, already fulfilled.”

“If only we could understand this more deeply! If only we could see and trust that all our ways of getting there, all our courses over time – our good deeds, our evil deeds, our regrets, our compulsive choosings and the fallout from those choosings, our things left undone and paths never actualized – are quietly held in an exquisite fullness that simply poises in itself, then pours itself out in a single glance of the heart. If we could only glimpse that, even for an instant, then perhaps we would be able to sense the immensity of love that seeks to meet us at the crossroads of the Now, when we yield ourselves entirely to it.”

The concept that “all possible outcomes – all our little histories, past, present, and future; all our hopes and dreams – are already contained and, mysteriously, already fulfilled” is profound. Delving deeply into it is beyond the scope of this post – and my own depth of understanding of this topic. But I encourage you to dive in. To tease your interest, I suggest you consider Bourgeault’s words in the context of some of the newest thinking on quantum wave-particle duality and its relationship to consciousness…

“Central to the theory of quantum physics is that all matter exhibits the properties of both particles and waves. This central concept is called the wave-particle duality. It is also universally agreed that waves of quantum objects are waves of possibility.
Each measurement causes a change in the state of matter “from a wave of possibilities to a particle of actuality”. This change is called the collapse of the wave function. In simple terms, this is the reduction of all the possibilities of the wave aspect into the temporary certainty of the particle aspect.”
— God is Not Dead, Amit Goswami

Or, ponder literary references…

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
— The Four Quartets, T.S. Elliot

Rich food for thought and contemplation, these concepts, and while they may be elusive, they are important to many of our actions. As Board members, they challenge us to impact the journey of others in our charge while letting the tiller be handled by those closer to the day-to-day action.

Surprise!!! I have a new home. On the Monday before Christmas I slipped off of Eagle Island in the trough between two storms, and early that afternoon closed on a little house in Stonington, Maine, a picturesque little fishing village about five miles from Eagle. It will serve as the staging platform for my hermit times out on the island, and for my travels and local teaching during the other seasons of my life.

Eagle Island Hermitage

I was as surprised as anyone else that this all dropped into my lap, and I admit it represents a compromise between my dreams of hermit solitude and the lived reality of a life given increasingly to travel and teaching. Getting to and from Eagle Island, even in summer when the mail boat runs daily, is always a bit of a push, and in the off-season when the boat runs two days a week at best (with wind and weather determining which two these will be), trying to schedule teaching and travel commitments made months in advance is simply not sustainable.  The only way to be on Eagle Island in the off-season is to BE here—clear the decks and simply hunker down.  I am planning to do exactly that this coming February and have cleared the decks accordingly. But my intuitions—and now my commitments—have indicated that this will be the exception rather than the rule.

It’s taken a lot of discernment to get to this point. I love this little hermitage I’ve gradually built out here on Eagle, on which I hold a lifetime lease (but don’t actually own.) As I write this, it’s a luminous beautiful, calm night on the first day of the “gaining” of the light. Yep, it’s still functionally dark at 4 pm and pitch black by 5. But each day we’ll be gaining now…And my little Advent wreath burns brightly with its four candles, and I chant the psalms and slip into silence in this magnificent, mystical heart of a Christmas season and am happy to be absolutely nowhere else…

But I know, too, that hermitting is not something one takes upon oneself simply as a lifestyle choice or even a spiritual preference. This quiet  listening space is all important in my life. But what I consistently hear in the listening is that the teaching is important, too, and in fact even more than the silence is the place of obedience, continuing covenant with Rafe, and continuing fruitfulness.

Damn! My hermit teacher is still telling me I can’t be a full-time hermit????

And yet I know that something has been coming into being, and I am a player in that coming-in-to-being, with the Wisdom Schools as the epicenter of where my contribution being called forth. I am accountable to this unfolding as well, and realize in my heart-of-hearts that it would simply be irresponsible to drop out in favor of the holy homesteading life on Eagle. That gift will come, in time, if it is to come. But for now, I seem to have to steer my life down the channel that has been carved for it.

New Stonington House

And so it all just casually came together this fall. The day after Labor Day I sailed my boat down to Stonington for its winter haul-out.  I spotted the house right at the top of School Street and casually arranged for a tour. It’s a modest little one-person place, but I liked its feel, and I particularly liked that due to the fact that School Street takes a jog right below the house, I wind up with an unobstructed water view, looking out over the harbor and the islands beyond the Deer Isle Thorofare. The price was about $100,000 lower than anything comparable in the neighborhood, so I thought, “Why not?” and casually put in a slightly low offer. I was stunned when it was immediately accepted.

The next steps just kept opening. My closest friends all gave the prospect their thumbs up. The bank approved me for a 4% mortgage (despite all the horror stories out there), and while it was indeed a fight to the finish, with an 11^th hour grand finale, all the pieces wound up falling into place. Helpful people kept showing up. The money came together with some INCREDIBLE help from friends and family. And mirabile dictu! The day of our scheduled closing fell in the trough between two storms, and I made it off Eagle Island.

View from Stonington House

What now? For a while, there will be no dramatic change in my life rhythms. The house came with a tenant already in place, and I plan to keep him there for a bit longer while I do my winter hermiting on Eagle this February and take some time for a long overdue assessment of priorities and facing of those inner tasks which present themselves so quietly, insistently, to those of us in our sixties.

But my little house is waiting for me there in Stonington—a good house, whose former owner actually reads my books and does Centering Prayer! When I asked Abba Joseph at Snowmass what role he thought the place might have to play in my life, he ventured immediately, “Stabilitas.” And he’s right, I think. After a decade now of circling the globe, with East Coast operations, West Coast operations, my dear Canada friends, my UK and NZ friends, and all options open, I at least now know where home is.

To all of you who have borne with me, prayed with me, and supported me throughout these years of journeying, my heartfelt thanks. I feel curious but remarkably graced as I share with you all this next stepping stone in the river that is my life.

With love,

Cynthia