Rhythm of Place, Part 2, San Damiano

 "... the Spirit doesn't really descend from on high but arises through the grassroots and through the body of Christ and through small groups, small communities, and individuals."

Laurence Freeman, OSB, Daily Wisdom, October 11, 2022 

     

Every day last week, I gathered with the community to celebrate the Eucharist. In this silent retreat, I would say that the majority of the people in attendance were Catholic. Even though I certainly knew Father Freeman was Catholic, and yes, we were in a Franciscan retreat house, I still was surprised. After being assured by Father Freeman that he would never withhold communion from anyone, I decided to take part. I am glad I did because I found some healing in the ritual, the words, and the repetition. I was reminded of a conversation I had some years ago with a woman who said that even though she was Presbyterian, there was one Lenten season when she attended mass every day at at Catholic church near her home. She found, as did I, that the daily rhythm of coming together to pray and meditate takes root and you will always feel a longing to return. 

 More and more, I find it strange to identify oneself by the church, temple, or synagogue that we attend. I know traditions and cultures are meaningful and this I respect. Yet, we are more. Our roots are deeper than we realize. This understanding is one of the gifts of meditation. Slowly, the thoughts of "I am this" dissolve, leaving us free to love. 

    

photograph: leaves in a fountain, San Damiano, October, 2022 

Rhythm of Place, Part 1 San Damiano

 Thanks to San Damiano's noisy, but quite efficient Keurig coffee maker, every morning this week I brewed a cup of coffee at 6:00 a.m. I would then go and sit under the oak trees at the San Damiano Retreat Center in Danville. Facing north, I would watch Mt. Diablo slowly being revealed as the sun rose. I grew fond of this mountain. The always busy 680 corridor was between us, but I was high enough and far enough away from it that the pre-dawn traffic seemed like a strand of jewels reverentially placed before the mountain. On the morning when I took this picture, tule fog was obscuring the freeway, and at one point almost covered the mountain. I was so captivated by this slow moving wave that I missed the 6:30 meditation.   

Being able to gaze daily upon a mountain is a blessing. I feel no need to climb a mountain, and I really do not care for the phrase, "bagging a mountain." I bag groceries, not mountains. While I like to think that mountains are indestructible, I know this is not the case. Regardless, mountains do inspire a sense of stability and permanence that seems to resonate with my soul. Then again so do prairies, but that is a subject for another time. 

There was much that I loved about this five day silent retreat led by Father Laurence Freeman.  While we gathered for meditation several times during the day and evening, the early morning meditation was my favorite. It reminded me of my spiritual direction intensives when we would gather every morning and evening for a contemplative prayer service. It was a collective rhythm that took root, and I think that will always be a part of me.  However, being silent at communal meals usually feels uncomfortable to me. My father seldom talked during meals unless company was present. While I seldom have a need to chatter incessantly while I eat, extended silence when I share a meal with others sometimes gives me a sense of loneliness. I was able to speak with Father Lawrence about it, and he suggested that I think of it as an extension of the Eucharist. I am still pondering that. However, this retreat was loving, and by the time we were coming out of the silence, I was adjusting to sitting at the table with others and not speaking. My last meal at San Damiano was breakfast on Friday, and our silence had ended that morning. Ironically, I found myself at a table with three women who were all very hard of hearing. Our conversation was limited, and I am still smiling about that. Perhaps that is what Father Laurence meant - just leave it all to God. 

I read and wrote very little at this retreat, but I did take pictures and scribbled some notes so I would remember. These I will share in the upcoming days. As always, you are welcome to read, or not, as you feel called.  

   

Love and Blessings,    

Sue Ann         

     

 

    

Sighting

 I so appreciate receiving this quote from Father Laurence Freeman this morning. I am reminded that when something is not fathomable, that is the time not just to shrug our shoulders and say, "Oh, well," or even immediately attack with intellectual zeal. Rather, that is the time to first bow to the Spirit in awe. 

 

"As we look into the depths of our own soul and see the wonder that is there, the wonder of God as the ground of our being, we experience mystery... Mystery is a real thing; it is not an airy-fairy thing. It is a real encounter with the living God. And reverence is that sense of wonder and respect that we have for the deep laws of nature and the deep laws of the spirit that we can't fully understand. They are mysterious, but we know that we are intertwined with them. We know we are living these deep mysteries, these laws of the spirit."   

 

 

image: San Leandro, September, 2022

Maybe This Is Perfection

 "Failure is something through which we have to learn. So every time you say your mantra and you get distracted, don’t see it as a failure. Just learn from it, and you learn by going back to it. So it’s not about success, it’s about perseverance. It’s not about success, it’s about faithfulness. And that’s how we learn and that’s how we grow. If you are trying to do it just by being perfect, you will exhaust yourself and you will give up. This way you will learn something immensely beneficial."   

Father Laurence Freeman, OSB     

 

This morning I reminded our dog Jack of this very thing. He was not trying to meditate, but rather get on the couch. He is older and sometimes has trouble getting his body and mind aligned to do what he wants. This morning he did not quite make it. He started to walk away, but I called him back, encouraging  him to try again. The second time, he had no trouble. Was it because he knew I was right behind him?  Maybe just trying again helped him focus?  Maybe a bit of both?  I do not know. What I do know is that I, too, often have a similar  struggle.  Yet, what I am slowly learning is that just as there is no such thing as perfection of faith, I am also learning that in my life there really is no such thing as perfection at all. Perfection is God's realm. I am grateful to set that burden down. I can move a little easier, be a little braver, laugh a little more readily.  It is all journey, and it is all a new undertaking. Fortunately, I still have a ways to go. 

 

  

   

image: San Leandro, May 2022      

 

A small group of us gather via Zoom every Wednesday at 4:00 Pacific time for a short period of meditation in the Christian tradition. If you would like to join us, drop me a note to get the link.   

 

Gentle Guidance

 "The journey is never dull if we make it in faith. The stillness is never static. And over it all, the open-armed, all-accepting embrace of Christ presides. He is the gate, the goal and the whole way. Our lives are soaked in Christ. There is nowhere he is not." 

This morning, at least for now, I finished reading Web of Silence by Laurence Freeman. I want to share these concluding words of the book for in them I find a universal truth. By all means, if you want to substitute another word for Christ, do so. If the pronouns bother you, change them. I think sometimes we get too wrapped up in such details. Fortunately, meditation moves us beyond words and concepts, leading us to understand that our words are meant to reveal a path. They are merely  an invitation to travel together for a while.  Let us go gently, grateful that our compass is Love.   

 

Blessings on your journey. 

   

image:  Villa Maria del Mar, October 2021 . This is certainly not a perfect photograph, but it always makes me smile. 

 

The Hermitage

"Every human heart is a hermitage, if we care to enter and find ourselves there in union with all. In solitude friend, foe and stranger are equally known in love."  

Web of Silence, Laurence Freeman, OSB  

 

Learning to meditate is learning to love. Father Freeman also writes, "In that stillness we learn the language of silence, the 'language of cosmic adoration' as Gandhi called it. Like all languages it is best learned by total immersion." 

 It is time to re-learn how to speak in our mother tongue.

Blessings on your journey.     

  

Meditation in the Christian Tradition is held on Zoom every Wednesday at 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time.  Contact me if you would like the link.  

 image:  San Leandro, June, 2021

When All Is Said and Done

 Laurence Freeman's book, Web of Silence is a  compilation of  12 "letters to meditators," and is a  thought provoking read.  I love that as our small group of meditators continue to come together on a weekly basis, I am discovering a sense of being part of something much larger than I was previously envisioning.  While I have often said that we are connected to one another in surprising ways, my sense of this connection is deepening.  We are simply, and wonderfully, a part of God's greater more. 

Yesterday, after our meditation,  we talked of learning acceptance and surrender. I know some people find the idea of surrender uncomfortable for it brings to mind all sorts of frightening images. Yet, if we do not learn to surrender to our lives in and to this moment, we cannot surrender our lives to God.  Faith is truly a come as you are journey. I can't take this journey, which is a journey to God, in any other body, in any other mind, but the one I have today.  At times, I think I am woefully inadequate. However, I must keep reminding myself that God never sees any of us as inadequate. As the psalmist says, we are "fearfully and wonderfully made."*

Because I do believe that we are part of a great web, I was not too surprised when I opened Father Freeman's book this morning and discovered the following passage concerning surrender:  

Meditation in this Christian perspective is an act of trust and surrender. It is empowered by the core Christian intuition that our spiritual journey matters deeply, ultimately not only to ourselves but to God to whom we are travelling. Our act of surrender, then, does not diminish us. Only partial surrenders humiliate. The all-trusting surrender of egotism in the shamelessness of mediation leaves us not less dignified but more humble, more real; and more at peace with ourselves because we are more at one with our true selves. 

If you have ever spent some time at the bedside of someone who is at peace while their physical journey is coming to a close, you may have witnessed the peace of such  reconciliation.  I have experienced  that peace filling a room and the hearts of those who drew near. Every time we sit down to our practice, we are practicing that art. January 6, 2021 would have been a very different day had the instigators learned that God is not found in the burnt offerings of  ideologies, but rather in our surrender to the great love in which we are held. Only then, can we find our freedom. Only then, can we live out our part in God's greater good.  

 

*Psalm 139:14

image: San Leandro, October 2021. I love the fact that the flowers of this tropical milkweed resemble a choir singing joyously of life.  

Group meditation in the Christian tradition is held most Wednesdays at 4:00 p.m. via Zoom. You are welcome to join us. 

       

Experiencing Place

"Faith is the highway of the spirit. Every act of faith we make is an uncovering of the labyrinth of spirit. Belief, sundered from faith, leads to a maze of mirrors, a series of infinite regressions, the egotistical maze. Mazes lead to dead-ends and the more we get lost the more we panic. Labyrinths only ask us to follow faithfully their strange but ultimately symmetrical loops and bends in order to lead us home to the centre."  

   

Laurence Freeman, OSB, First Sight, The Experience of Faith, Continuum 2011, p. 14     

   

To cling to those ideas that we tenaciously call beliefs, leads to separation. Separation is indeed a dead-end. One thing about dead-ends though, is that we can usually turn around and go back out. Faith allows us to maneuver, sometimes with some dexterity, our way to love. In yesterday's group meditation, we discussed the November 3 entry in  John Main's book, Silence and Stillness in Every Season: "What we think of as our 'centre' is too often an illusion of the self-reflecting ego, somewhere we like to take up our stand and observe God at work in us. But this can never be the way.  The challenges that face us point to the mystery of union we are summoned to enter. But we find our way into this mystery of union with others and with God only when we reach in ourselves that place where Jesus experiences His oneness with the Father. That place where he prayed, 'I in them and Thou in me, that they may become perfectly one.'"*  

  

In other words, center (or centre) is not some private dwelling place, but rather a place of union with all.  For there Christ (or whatever sacred entity you worship) is. We are not called to ourselves but to the universal self.  We are that related. 

    

* I think Father Main threw in that word perfectly.  The translations I have seen of John 17:21 read, "That they may all be one." Even the King James version reads, "That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." However, so far, I have not seen Laurence Freeman or John Main cite what translations they are referencing when quoting scripture.   

       

photograph: San Leandro (just a block from our house), November, 2021 

Mantras

 I have finished, for the second time, Laurence Freeman's book, Jesus, the Teacher Within. I highly recommend it, whether you are a meditator or not.  It is a beautiful, thoughtful  and inspiring book. 

I will say that my Lenten decision this year to practice meditation in the Christian tradition is beginning to bring some subtle gifts to my life.  I worry  less and impatience is slowly loosening its grip. I am trusting my path a little more because I sense Jesus' presence there.  I am grateful and humbled. 

I  want to share what Laurence Freeman included in his book about mantras. I find having a mantra a helpful navigation tool, and I think this must  be generally true regardless of what meditation tradition is practiced, or if one does not practice at all. We all have those moments in our lives that threaten to upend us. Slowly repeating a mantra can help bring us back to our center, back to the Christ within us. There, we can find compassion and love that is almost always needed, either for ourselves or for others.  Here, Lawrence Freeman is quoting John Main's book, Word into Silence:   

 

"We usually begin by saying the mantra, that it seems as though we are speaking it with our mind silently, somewhere in our head. But as we make progress the mantra becomes more familiar, less of a stranger, less of an intruder in our consciousness. We find that less effort is required to persevere in saying it throughout the time of our meditation. Then it seems we are not so much speaking it in our minds as sounding it in our heart, and this is the stage that we describe as the mantra becoming rooted in our hearts..."* 

I think it is important for us to remember we all have mantras running through our heads that often we are not even aware of. These are the habitual thoughts that propel us into our lives. Many of these soundings are not positive nor helpful.  Too often, they lead to distraction and a sense of isolation, rather than illumination and a sense of union. 

If you would like to meditate with others on Zoom, but 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday does not work for you, drop me a note. Advent is on the horizon, and adding an evening session so we can come together to meditate in that beautiful season sounds wonderful to me. Meditating with others is an experience I cannot yet put into words. Perhaps it is simply that when we come together in silence, we can actually experience that yes, God is love, and we are knitted together in wonderful ways. I believe this is how we can bring peace to our world: one breath, one syllable at a time. 

 

And this I know in the secret silence of my heart

Where your awareness dwells 

And embroiders me into the fabric of the physical world 

Out of the slender thread only your eyes can see 

Recorded by your hand into the book of the world

All the days of recordable life 

Even before I live them   

 

from Psalm 139, Opening to You, 

Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms, 

Norman Fischer      

  

photograph: Oakland, October 2021   

 

*Jesus the Teacher Within, Laurence Freeman, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000, page 222  

  

     

    

Relating

I needed to see the post below about forgiveness this morning. Maybe every morning. Father Freeman also reminds me that the real purpose of meditation is to let the meditation usher in a whole new way of being. "It helps us see that the place we should look for the fruits of meditation is not the meditation period itself - what happens (or doesn't) but in the manner and quality of our lives, particularly in our relationships." * We see this in Jesus, who would go to a mountain top, or across the lake, or into the desert. He always returned to the people. For most of us, this is our call. He also reminded people to forgive. Forgiveness and healing go hand in hand. 

'So our first responsibility, if we want to be in relationship and we want that relationship to be a healthy one and a healing one and a caring one for the people we are in relationship with, our first responsibility to others is to be as healthy and as happy as we can be ourselves. And that involves not being too hard on ourselves when we fail. In other words, we incorporate the sense of failure into our practice and learn from failure." **

 

   

   

*Jesus the Teacher Within, Laurence Freeman, copyright 2003, p. 199   

 

**Laurence Freeman, OSB, World Community for Christian Meditation,  Daily Digest, October 8, 2021 

image: San Leandro, September 2021