The retreat was really good. It was nice to get out of the city, nice to be with people I didn't know very well from church, nice not to be with people who do what I do all day. It was also my first trip on the Long Island Railroad, and a first whiff of Fall - and it's always nice to be at a monastery. (This was my first Franciscan house, let alone Anglican Franciscan.) I won't bore you with a full account of all we did, but I'll tell you about a few things that worked well.Friday night after dinner we went around the room (we were fifteen plus Mother Liz) to introduce ourselves, say why we we had come to the retreat if we wanted, and recount something that had happened in the last week which "opened our hearts." I was moved by the eloquence and the honesty of people's accounts, and by the variety of little miracles which move people. (My reason for coming, I said, was that "I suck at small talk" and indeed this proved the perfect setting for making new friends; in Australia I had missed Holy Apostles, and continued to think of myself as a member, but how odd that I actually know so few fellow parishioners. The experience which opened my heart was an e-mail from my friend Beth - with whom, mea culpa, I haven't spoken in months - writing to me to thank me for updates on this blog about the fires in California and how my parents were doing, and the words "I'm very concerned." Thanks, Beth. You opened my heart, and fifteen others.)
Then we had to find someone to have an intensive 6-minute conversation on a theme, three minutes each, before finding another partner for another conversation on another theme. The artificiality and the time-constraint made for remarkably frank discussions. Themes ranged from "someone who exemplifies bravery for you" and "vulnerability" to "awe" and "commitment" and even "fear as a teacher" (my partner and I concurred in not thinking it a very good teacher at all). I'm not sure you could do this with people who aren't Americans, and/or in the comfort zone of a church retreat, but it was intense and inspiring.On Saturday we discussed the story of Jesus walking on water and Peter's asking to be commanded to join him, which was good up to a point... until we decided to do "something physical." So a bunch of us formed a boat, some people got in, one of them Peter, others were the waves and winds, and the last was Jesus. Silly, but fun and active and - transformative. As we unpacked the experience later, it was clear (to me at least) that we'd broken through to a deeper understanding of things. The man who played Peter said he felt genuine fear stepping out of the boat, and sank into the water more quickly than he had expected. The other disciples, unnamed in scripture, wrestled with feelings of fear, bafflement and resentment at Peter's initiative. (It gave me new insight into the travails of the Anglican Communion.) And us boat and elements people enjoyed connecting with nature, protecting (but also knocking around) the disciples, etc. The power of improv is truly amazing. We became a group through this activity.
The afternoon was open, but not without suggested activities. We started by going out, again in pairs, to walk in the woods, one with eyes closed and the other as guide, for 10 minutes each. I was one of many for whom there was no fear in this at all - I even asked my guide to take me somewhere where I could run with my eyes shut, which I did (trippy!), and still don't know where I was as I ran. For some others it was an experience of terror, eventually softening into a sense of cautious safety.
Then a few of us walked down the hill to nearby Long Island Sound, some journaled, and everyone made a collage - most using some of the beautiful leaves, though a big pile of magazines went through many hands, too. (I could put in a picture of my collage if you're interested. It's rather, um, intellectual. I used several things from a science magazine.)After dinner, and before discussing the collages and other things (a somewhat frustrating discussion, as the collages were almost too personal, and the seriousness of our discussions kept getting upset by nervous jokes and tangents), I walked the labyrinth behind the Friary. I'm no great fan of labyrinths, but this is a nice one. It was cold and dark and misty and I was alone, so I didn't linger. But I had a chance to go again Sunday before heading home (I had to leave early to participate in an Open House at school) in bright sunshine and with a few fellow travelers. To my surprise,
it was more solitary doing it with others; the moments where you walked past people seemed fleeting and doomed to be merely episodic... until I got to the center, and had the sense of a giant mill, of people on their own individual spiritual journeys but orbiting the same center: our lives are concentric. Augustine's assertion that God is closer to me than I am to myself made a new kind of sense, and a sense of oneness with "concentric" others. But it still troubles me how individualistic it is. It offers the community of monks who go about their own business except for the shared offices, but nothing like the collective effervescence (or calm) of a church community who are continually present to each other.The theme of the retreat was "courage," which, we soon learned, means many things to many people, from the daily courage to go on to the courage to take a prophetic stance, or to make a change in one's life. But in many different ways there's one thing almost everyone said: that what strikes one person as courageous probably doesn't seem to the person doing it as courageous - a phenomenon I know from my study of the good. For my part, I started with a picture of courage as a heroic, "manly" thing which I think a dangerous ideal but I moved to a richer understanding through the very different meaning of courage in French, and all the heart/coeur words related to it, from taking (or losing) heart to be being heartened (or disheartened), encouraged (or discouraged). The story of Peter saying "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water" (Mt 14:28) turned out to be the perfect one for thinking and feeling our way through the mystery of how our own hearts are charged by others - and how we may even need others to do this for us. In many profound and not-so-profound ways we are "given heart" by others.
A nice thing, a retreat, and with a group.
