Dawn ...

Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. 

Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.”
~ Leonora Carrington

A Pilgrimage into Silence and Beyond

If you are looking for A Pilgrimage into Silence and Beyond, my photos and reflections of my journey to Our Lady of Guadalupe Benedictine Abbey in Pecos, New Mexico, you can take the links in the order listed below. 

On the blog, they are in reverse which confuses some people.  I invite you to move forward slowly.  You can move through them by taking the link at the bottom of each post to the next post.

1. Beginning the Journey
2. Welcome to Pecos Abbey
3. Silence, Sabbath, and Snow
4. Journey Home

A Pilgrimage into Silence and Beyond: Journey Home

at the Abbey, 

in the dark, 

I would rise to chant with the monks for Vigils at 6 am.  The sun took that time to rise.  Before we finished our readings back and forth, one side to another and all for God ... I could see the snow falling.

This morning we read Psalm 22:14 and these words shimmered off the page and into my heart:

"I am poured out like water ..."

each word echoing within me 

as I readied myself for the journey home.

O yes, my heart is singing

I AM poured out like water!

I AM coming home!

waiting to leave, writing in my journal ... 

i am poured out like water from an earthen vessel   cracked in all the right places and so many wrong places.  Weeping and seeping with turbulent emotions raging like the Pecos River so close.  Receiving God's love -- love like living water and so pours forth the love of God into the world.  And how can that love pour forth without the cracks?  Without each carefully crafted crack the water would lay dormant in its container, stagnant, smelly ... ugliness drifting from within, emerging from the outer edge of consciousness.  so I will rejoice in each new crack in the vessel of clay that I am.  O God, I am the raging river and you are my shoreline, guiding me, holding me, loving me.  I marvel at your presence and your love poured upon my grief.  Yes!  Yes!  Yes!  Pour forth your healing grace and love, make your presence known to all who grieve today and every day, to all who are broken, to all who are healing.  Pour on!  Amen!

A blessing for the Journey Home

May your trails be crooked, winding,
lonesome, dangerous,
leading to the most amazing view.
May your mountains rise
into and above the clouds.
~Edward Abbey

  

Vaya
Con Dios!


Go
with God!

To begin the journey from the beginning, take this link:

A Pilgrimage into Silence and Beyond 

 

A Pilgrimage into Silence and Beyond: Silence, Sabbath, and Snow

"Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.”
~Mary Oliver

I woke up in the dark to the snow falling upon a white blanket of fresh snow laying upon the earth.  There is a gentle quality to the silence as the star-shaped flakes float to the ground.  Birds sing a new song and prayer rises from within, may I trust you, O God, that I am exactly where I am meant to be. 

We have to learn

to invite Silence

and having invited Silence

we now have to

learn to enter Silence.

~ Robert Sardello 

   Sabbath invites us to stop.

It invites us to rest.
It asks us to notice
that while we rest,
the world continues
without our help.
It invites us to delight
in the world’s
beauty and abundance.”
~ Wendell Berry

 

Snow falling, snow falling, snow falling and what shall become of me?  a pilgrimage into wildness ... wilderness wanderings and how is my soul traveling, anxiety emerges like rocks in the stream, stumbling blocks to experiencing God in all of her glory and wild imaginings ... snow falling, snow falling, snow falling, such a different day is today!  for yesterday the sun was shining.

 

 What can I learn from the snow today?  of God, of nature, of love, of stillness, of silence and solitude, too.  It is wild in the wilderness!  Touch me in the wild spaces of my soul, O God and let the ducks quack, the bird sing ... to me, to the world, to those who have passed from this world into the next, into beauty divine.  Wrap me in your presence and let there be peace within my soul.  

Do not go where the path may lead,

go instead where there is no path

and leave a trail. 

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Take this link for Part 4: Journey Home

To begin the journey from the beginning, take this link:
A Pilgrimage into Silence and Beyond  

A Pilgrimage into Silence and Beyond: Welcome to Pecos Abbey

the Power of Slowing meets us in the wilderness.  

~ Gerald May, The Wisdom of Wilderness

I began to experience the Power of Slowing as we drove into the mountains and approached the Abbey.  The clouds were beginning to break in the distance and much of the recent snow had melted into the earth, only flurries in the wind to remind me of the wild nature of the wilderness I would be immersed in for the next few days.

the river calls ... divine whispering in the wind

                                                               Be still and Know that I am God.   Psalm 46:10  

 

In the sunshine and in the snow, I am God.

In your walking and in your resting, I am God.

In your joy and in your sadness, I am God.

In your laughter and in your tears, I am God.

In silence, everything is experienced as "within" but not as "within us."  We, along with everything else, are within silence.

~Robert Sardello

God of the Wilderness,

May I sink deep, deep into Silence.

Amen.

The Prior at Pecos Abbey, Father Aidan, invited us to join the monks for praying the hours of the Daily Office.  From their schedule, I set my own:  Vigils 6 am, Midday 12 noon, Vespers 5 pm, and Compline 7:15 pm.  Listening for the bells ... leaving my silence for sweet moments of worship.

 Trees dance in the wind

branches shiver in the cold

like my soul on a brisk winter walk.

Sunsets are so beautiful that they almost seem 

as if we were looking through the gates of Heaven.

~John Lubbock

And now I lay me down to sleep ... Amen!

Take this link for Part 3: Silence, Sabbath, and Snow

To take the journey from the beginning, take this link:
A Pilgrimage into Silence and Beyond 
 

A Pilgrimage into Silence and Beyond: Beginning the Journey

As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, 

a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow.
A. C. Benson

The way I've always heard people talk about pilgrimage is to say, "a pilgrimage is a physical journey with a spiritual purpose."   I recently journeyed on my own to Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in Pecos, New Mexico to meet up with small band of spiritual travelers.  As I look back and consider how my recent pilgrimage to Pecos unfolded, I believe it started with a simple email newsletter that popped into my inbox.  It came from The Center for Christian Spirituality, a ministry of Chapelwood United Methodist Church in Houston. 

The flyer said, "Exploring Wisdom from the Wilderness" and it said we would dwell mostly in silence.  Yes.  I felt drawn to this and my calendar gave me permission.  Yes.  I will do this.  Simple.

“The Wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.”
~ Nancy Wynne Newhall

Suddenly, several days after I said yes I got a phone call from my sister, "Clarissa (my niece) is being transferred to a Hospice facility.  How soon can you be here?"  This was a journey I didn't want to make ... this was a journey no one wants to take.  

The evening that I arrived or maybe it was the second evening, the days all ran one into the other ...    

writing in my journal ... 

 Sitting here on the open top floor of the parking garage, praying as the sun sets, remembering that God loves us all so much that the sun rises and the sun sets with such beauty it takes the breath away ... in much the same way Clarissa does when she enters a room.

The days spent with my niece and my sister and all of the family gathered at her bedside for more than a week had a surreal substance to them, and I found myself being hollowed out from within as her young heart kept her lingering several days past when I had to leave.  I found that I was dwelling in that room with her even though I was no longer with her, liminal space ... God space ... all of life became a "thin space," where the veil between this world and the eternal world is so thin you can almost reach out and touch eternity ... not with your body nor even with your senses really but more with your spirit.  

"Heaven and Earth are only three feet apart,

but in the thin places that distance is even smaller."

~ an old Celtic saying

On Transfiguration Sunday as I was leading worship, I came to a line in the Prayers of the People, "O God ... receive the dying."   As many times as I had previewed that prayer, I had not "seen" those words.   As I was standing before the people, I did see them ... before I read them.  And I was overcome with tears welling up within me, tears that had refused to fall before that moment.  I barely made it through that prayer even as I felt the strength pouring into me from God and the people, it sank to my feet and still the hollowness was left as I thought, "Transfiguration Sunday is a good day to die."  Clarissa died that evening and my soul was suddenly released from waiting in Vigil so far away from her and my sister. 

And the journey continues, so much work left undone over the days and yes, I did think, "I should cancel my trip to Pecos."  But my soul hung on as I heard the call of the mountains in Pecos ...

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. 

And when you have reached the mountain top, 

then you shall begin to climb. 

And when the earth shall claim your limbs, 

then shall you truly dance.
~ Khalil Gibran

Take this link for Part 2: Welcome to Pecos Abbey