The Great Silence: Invitation to Awareness

Deep peace of the running wave to you, 

of water flowing, rising and falling,

                     sometimes advancing, sometimes receding                    

 ~Celtic Prayer~

Breathing in … Creator God

Breathing out … fill me with Peace

 
On the 2nd and final evening of our contemplative retreat, I offered a labyrinth peace walk in silent community ... I walked toward the end and on my way out, I did a few turns on the turns, I suppose it is almost like dancing, that's what people say as they watch, for me it is simply the way I respond ... on one of the turns I heard Clarissa's sweet sweet voice in my head, "I'm dancing in heaven now!" and I felt her love.  You see, that is one of the things I used to tell her as I tried to give her a vision of heaven, that one day she would be dancing in heaven.  They say that your dying loved one can hear what you say and is fully aware of you. Oh how she loved to dance!  wow!  still there are no tears, no emotion that I am feeling.  Why?

The next morning I walked the labyrinth again, on my own, carrying a prayer station card with the word "sorrow" on it, the other side held the bible verse "My soul is weary with sorrow; strengthen me according to your word."

Very logically I think, I thought, "I will carry the first part "my soul is weary with sorry" as my release phrase and the second part, "strengthen me according to your word" as my response phrase and I'll just be still in the center.    As I walked in I saw something new, someone had written on a card beside a canvas Jesus sculpture at the edge of the labyrinth,

"When was the last time you cried on my shoulder?"  wow, too long Jesus ... and I walked ... perhaps it was somewhere on the way out that I realized I was no longer experiencing grief, grief had been left behind on my yoga mat, when tears streamed down my face exactly a week after Clarissa died.  Now I was experiencing guilt, and strongly.  Why hadn't I been closer to her?  Why hadn't I reached out in a more meaningful way?  Why hadn't I asked more questions at MD Anderson?  Why had I not been there to talk about what would happen in the end?  Why hadn't I done more to help her?  Why? Why? Why?    All these questions and more I asked after I left the labyrinth ... guilt can a crippling thing, I think.   I didn't experience a release of the guilt, not in a tangible way on the labyrinth but I think I can work through it, now that I am aware for it feels different than working through grief.   

I walked outside onto the porch and suddenly there was a cardinal on a shrub by the lake

and it beckoned me to come.   Since my mother's death birds are a sign from heaven, especially cardinals which she loved.  red, she did so love the color red.  I walked down to the lake with my camera and she flew up to the top of the trees, of course it was really a he but since it's some kind of metaphor I am not bothered by that ...

A cardinal is a representative 
of a loved one who has passed. 
When you see one, 
it means they are visiting you. 
They usually show up 
when you most need them 
or miss them.    ~ unknown ~

I looked up, and suddenly the sun shined, the clouds floated, and the tree swayed in the wind.  I was enveloped in the love of the cardinal, in the love of God our Creator and in the love of all the saints who have gone before us.  In this moment we are one.

I am a ditch-dweller.  I am one who lays on her back looking up,  seeing chaos on one side and beauty on the other.  I am one who knows they simply reside side by side, interwoven and uneasy friends on the path of life.

Take this Link for Part 4: The Great Silence: Invitation to Community

To begin this journey from the beginning, take this link:  The Great Silence

 

The Great Silence: Invitation to Community

Don't be ashamed of tears.

The earth's tears keep her flowers blooming.

~Rabindranath Tagore

Those who shed tears as they plant will sing for joy

when they reap the harvest.  Psalm 126:5

Well, I don't cry much.  I seem to hold all of my tears stored within me for a time when I am able and able is not always and never at the drop of a hat!  It just doesn't work that way for me or perhaps I just don't allow it.  What holds me back?  What always holds me back is that I might be taken to a place where I will get lost in them, a place that I cannot return from but it is really that I won't return without having been transformed and that is ... just a tiny bit scary maybe.  It could be 1 million, 1 thousand things really.  Maybe I don't like to feel lost, even though I think I am lost a lot but I don't let it show.  Sometimes, I wonder if I'll ever be found ... my mind is a maze (not a labyrinth) and my heart is easily overwhelmed.  Ahhh ...

Almost time to go home, at the end of our retreat, we sent forth our retreatants with a love feast and a time of gentle sharing.  Lo and behold, as I began sharing my journey through the silence, grief and guilt with this community, the gift of tears were mine.  And it wasn't scary at all.  It was good, it still IS good.  

I've been touched in my inner being through this community of caring contemplative "BEings" and it is good, very good. 

Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community.
~Anthony J. D'Angelo 

And our little community of contemplatives care about the world, too.  As we made our journey of silence, we prayed for peace in the world through our Intercessory Prayer World Map ... for a contemplative is never complete without action!  If you look closely you will notice the small "jewels" with which we adorned our world map to symbolize our prayers. 

and my joy is complete for our 2015 Great Silence!  Amen and Amen!

Perhaps you might like to attend The Great Silence next year.  Email me and ask to be put on my Monthly Newsletter List and you'll get all the up to date news for The Great Silence, other retreats and offerings of MOSAIC Spiritual Formation Ministry:  Email Cindy 

To begin this journey from the beginning, take this link:  The Great Silence

The Great Silence: Invitation to Silence

For You alone my soul waits in silence;

From the Beloved comes my salvation.

Enfolding me

with strength and steadfast love,

My faith shall remain firm….

In the Silence rests my freedom

and my guidance,

for You are the Heart of my heart,

You speak to me in the Silence.

Trust in Love at all times, O people

Pour out your heart to the Beloved;

Let Silence be a refuge for you.

~Psalm 62, Nan Merrill, Psalms for Praying

Gathering together to focus our attention on God during our silence, we pondered this psalm by engaging in a modified Lectio Divina (sacred reading) ... As you hear the sacred text, are there words that call to you?   As I read and heard the words, "let silence be a refuge for you" I knew God was calling me.  And is there an invitation here for you?  The invitation that God is extending to me is to see my ditch as a refuge and to let the silence envelop me, to let God wrap me in gentle presence as I sink into the silence.  And how do you respond to that invitation?   Gasping for soul-breath, I smile on the inside ...

and I write, from my journal: As I enter the silence, I am finding the ditch I am laying in is a river of grief and more but what more I don't know yet.  As  I find myself laying in that ditch, looking upward for God, trying to make sure all is well ... For you alone my soul in silence waits, O God and I try to lay in the ditch allowing silence to be my refuge.

You have called me into this silence

to be grateful for what silence I have

and to use it by desiring more.

~Thomas Merton, Dialogues with Silence

I am so grateful for the silence.  The silence is a refuge.  The ditch is a refuge for I find Silence within it.   And I smile again for I have found myself to be a "ditch-dweller" and that is just fine with me.

I am one who, while laying on her back in the water staring up at the sky, wonders about God.  I am the rocks impeding the peacefulness of the water, causing ripples and splashes and chaos in the river.  I am the water, soft and pliable, moving around all obstacles in my path, finding a new way of being.  I am the waves, I never stop, flowing in and flowing out.  I am the hedges, a growing wall to keep others out of my inner sanctum.  I am the pathway, inviting others on the journey.  I am the sand, gritty and irritating, finding a way to cause trouble just by being me.  I am the bridge, ornate and beckoning others to journey from one side to the other, but why?  and to where?  no where?  I am the pinnacle, watching over the land of my soul, remote and distant ... yet perhaps I observe from afar, keeping my distance but also keeping my perspective.   This is what I hope of myself, the ditch-dweller.

When God threw me, a pebble, 

into this wondrous lake, 

I disturbed its surface with countless circles.
But when I reached the depths 

I became very still.   ~Kahlil Gibran

Oh how still nature is ... and may I become that still, may I find rest and peace in the Silence

The most basic experience of Silence is intimacy.

We feel an intimacy with the world, 

as if we are within everything around us 

rather than behind or alongside

things that we are looking at ... 

we feel how we, in our individuality, 

are a part of a vast and mysterious world ... 

when we cultivate Silence to the point

that we are consciously within it

rather than imagining that it is in us,

we cannot be other than what we are."

~Robert Sardello, Silence: the Mystery of Wholeness

journaling with an image in my journal ...

I am a tiny vessel on a vast sea.  This isn't a bad thing when I am feeling God's love as the sea, relentlessly rolling in waves upon the beach, never stopping, never ending.  However, I am not feeling God's love.  I am not feeling God's ever presence.  O so deeply I am feeling God's profound absence which is rather surreal because I still "know" that you are there, God, you are here.  I just don't feel you or rather I can't "sense" you.  And yet, here I am, talking to you as if I am talking to myself.  Today, I use this lovely word "vast" to speak of you.  You are as vast as the ocean, as the sky, as the world, as the universe and all of creation beyond what the eye can see or the mind can imagine and that is vast!  You are all that is and interestingly, you are all that is not.  You simply are.  And there is something about the depths of the ocean and the expanse of the sky that invites me to let go and melt into the vastness of creation ... In you alone do I find rest and peace, my sweet, incredible, invincible, amazingly absent God ... In you alone do I find my rest and peace.

 

 

 Amen!

Take this Link to Part 3: The Great Silence: Invitation to Awareness

To begin this journey from the beginning, take this link:  The Great Silence

The Great Silence: Invitation to Healing

Easter on the calendar may not be Easter in my soul.

~John Winn, For All Seasons

If there is one line in one prayer that resonates with me every single year during Lent, it is this line from John Winn's "A Lenten Prayer for Slow Walkers on the Road from Bethlehem to Jerusalem."  In my experience, sharing it with others while warming the labyrinth, I am not the only one.  

As I led a Holy Week Service of Wholeness, reading this prayer with a small group of women, I found a home in these words.  As a small group of early-risers stood together sharing communion at our "sunrise" service, watching the clouds drift by, no "sunrise" for us, the words once again rose up within me.  Easter on the calendar is not Easter in my soul.  I felt like those bewildered women at the tomb on Easter morning.  I think the sense of the words of this prayer were true for them that day, there was no joy.  This year's lectionary text from the book of Mark (16:8) says this of the women who went to the tomb in the early morning and found it empty, "they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."   I know the words of this prayer have never been truer for me right now, I am not feeling "Easter" in my soul.  And that is OK ... for this year, I have been profoundly affected by the loss of my niece, Clarissa.

The Great Silence staff gathered on "Easter Monday" to prepare for retreatants to arrive on Tuesday.  It was a glorious day by the lake ... to breathe, to ponder, to invite silence

Lakeview Methodist Conference Center, Palestine, TX

All the streams carry the wisdom of the forest to the lake, 

and over there silence replaces the noise!  

~Mehmet Murat Ildan

As I walked to my cabin, I stopped by the beautiful Dogwood tree in bloom to drink in the beauty of its delicate blossoms and its fragile strength.   When I was young, I remember taking long drives with my parents.  I would lay my head in my mother's lap and when the dogwood bloomed amongst the pine trees along the side of the road, she would tell me the Legend of the Dogwood.  It was a story that connected my fledgling faith and nature in a way that nothing else did at the time.

As a staff, we finished setting up the kitchen and the lodge with

prayer stations, formational reading material, lots of battery tealights, 

and the small labyrinth.   

Then we sat with one another to share the sacred stories of our lives with one another.  I asked a question that I was asked many times by a former mentor, Wendy J. Miller.  This question held much of our sharing and was particularly helpful for me that night as it carried me into the silence and up out of the silence to awareness, "What ditch did you cross to get here today?  To my surprise, I said, "It is the grief I carry and the tears that refuse to fall.  I fear I will never cross the ditch for I am laying in it, unable to move and all I can see is chaos.  I am hoping that entering the silence will create a space for my tears to fall so that I might begin to crawl out of this ditch or perhaps to learn to live from within them." 

 There is a sacredness in tears.

~Washington Irving

As I laid my head down to sleep that night, I pondered the invitation to healing that I sensed God was offering me. I wasn't sure I would be able to enter into this invitation but I slept well thinking of it and of the God of Silence who so gently holds each one of us and loves us right where we are. 

Take this link for Part 2: The Great Silence: Invitation to Silence

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