Day four on retreat, Feast of the beheading of John the Baptist

Today I slept too much. Yesterday I slept every chance I could get. I was feeling a little bad about it. But then the Prior fell asleep during meditation and was snoring loudly.

Father William woke him up after a few minutes. He later said that there is a story in the Benedictine tradition that told of a monk who fell asleep during church and instead of waking him up his superior put his head in his lap so he would sleep more comfortably.

“But,” said father William, “if a straight boy wakes up with his head in another man’s lap he’s not going to sleep well for a while.”

The schedule here must have worn me more than I realized. I couldn’t fall asleep easily last night. I laid in bed from 8:30 to about 10:30 thinking about the Psalm that said, “I lie down and sleep comes immediately” and silently gave God a hard time because that wasn’t the case.

This morning I got up for matins at four and afterwards went back to sleep. I set the alarm to wake me for lauds but I forgot to turn it on.

I slept hard. So hard it hurt. I had bad dreams: one each of Ella and Foster near death. I woke up to find I had missed Lauds, Terse and the Eucharist. The Eucharist!

Part of why I couldn’t get to sleep last night is that I was writing a monastic rule in my head for a pentecostal family order that would have eucharist seven times a day! I love the eucharist!

I said terse from my prayer book in my room and went down to the refectory (the dining hall) for pittance (coffee and cookies).

Father William saw me and said, “Someone made the baby Jesus cry this morning!”

“I cried my self when I realized it,” I replied. From then on the day progressed. My Canadian friends left for home. My love goes with them and my other fellow retreatants.

After dinner tonight I took a row boat out on the small lake. It was half serenity itself and half struggling through rotting peat.

Today was the feast of John the Baptist’s beheading. Happy decapitation! For lunch they broke out some meat! A delicious salmon, mashed potatoes and broccoli. Feast days are special.

Orthodox Spiritual Direction

Here in the monastery library I found a book called, “Spiritual Direction in the Early Christian East,.” It has a forward by Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware which discusses the concept of staretz or fathers in the Russian Orthodox tradition.

He describes a “golden chain,” a sort of secondary apostolic succession happening as these spiritual fathers who helped form the disciples of the next generation.

From what he wrote I get the impression that these fathers teneded to be very directive. They administered penance, not, Ware points out, as punishment, but as a doctor prescribing a remedy (xii). In addition to doctor, Ware also uses the images of counsellor, intercessor and mediator.

“Healer, teacher, man of prayer - the spiritual fathers is all these things, and yet he is something more.... anadochos denotes ... standing surety for his obligations” (xxiii).

While the spiritual director in the Orthodox tradition may be more authoritarian one may also expect to be dearly valued by their spiritual director. They stand before God responsible for their directees. They take upon themselves the responsibility of their directees spiritual formation - a kind of cosigner in their covenant with God.

I haven’t had any experience with a directive approach to spiritual direction. I have neither been wounded by it or could speak to its power. Since reading Dostoevski’s accounts of startsi in the Russian Orthodoxy, I have found myself drawn to submitting myself in obedience to a holy man.

Perhaps it is the romance of
Buddhist monks learning martial arts from a wise old master. Or the mystique of the orient and the draw of the hermitage.

The Focus of Spiritual Direction

When I first started Spiritual direction My director asked me what my conception of a Spiritual Director was. This was well before I began this program and my main example for spiritual direction was Father Zosama in Dostoevsky's “Brothers Karamazov.” I thought of some contemplative who I could submit in obedience, who would stretch me in the practices of devotion and discipline - like a good doctor or gardener will diagnose and treat ailments.

Instead he gently listened to what God was doing in me. He didn’t hold me accountable, though my disciplined life did become stronger.

Still Barry and Conolly’s description of one whose sole purpose is to help me see God’s involvement in my every day life, clarified for me what my director had been doing (Spiritual Direction in Practice 5).

It is that focus, I believe, that distinguishes spiritual direction from the other helping ministries. There is indeed much overlap as the authors note, but singleness of focus on the presence of God in all things provides boundaries for the way the director will respond to any given situation (Spiritual Direction in Practice 142.)

I am reading Barry and Connoly’s Spiritual Direction in Practice here at St. Gregory’s Abby. The compounding of the Divine Office and daily Eucharist in this beautiful setting has me all warm with consolations. So I receive it easily and joyfully that the spiritual director should have “surplus warmth.” In a world which sometimes grants more desolation than consolation it is easily apparent why a warm environment works for spiritual direction. The director his/herself is the representation of Divine consolation. In their presence we are warmed by God, through the gifts he has given them. No wonder Bakke calls directions sessions “a pure gift.”

Spiritual Direction and the ordinary Christian

Thomas Merton suggests that spiritual direction is necessary for those with a vocation as a religious. An argument can be made, and he entertained (Spiritual Direction and Meditation p.14), that all ordinary Christians have a vocation of some kind to use their all for God.

What strikes me is that Merton suggests that the ordinary Christian should, in the course of faithful involvement in church, have their basic needs for spiritual direction met.

Much has changed, even in the Roman Catholic church since Merton wrote this. Private confession is rare. I wonder what we can do as churches to fill the basic needs of spiritual direction that will draw people to a greater intimacy with Christ, where perhaps they will desire a more formal directing relationship. Can we somehow create a community that is mutually supportive, a family of spiritual friends? How do we start?

Yet Merton points out that the general direction afforded by participation in church is “not really what we mean by spiritual direction in the present study” (Spiritual Direction and Meditation p.14).

If the ordinary direction that should be expected as a part of the sacrament isn’t deep enough for those who have a vocation to be a religious, how is it enough for the ordinary Christian? Is it that it has become a more hostile world than it was in Merton’s time? He points out that spiritual fathers and mothers were desperately needed in the danger of the hermit’s desert. Are we face in our cities and affluence less assaulted by demons than the monks who thought the dwelled in the desert? Perhaps to face the powers of hell today one only need visit an industrialized country.

Or is it that the contemplative life - the inner life isn’t for the ordinary Christian? I hope not. I sure hope the ordinary working class folk in my church can taste the depths of Christ, not content to work and struggle and wait for their piece of the pie in the sky by and by. “Man fully alive is the glory of God.”(St. Irenaeus).

Even if the whole life of a person in in their turkeys, God can be found there, perhaps with the help of a director.

Interestingly the Monks here at St. Gregory use Merton's logic to justify their own lack of a spiritual director, their rule creates a structure for the spiritual formation of the men.

Day two on retreat

Thank you, dear God, for your consolations today. I woke up this morning to your stars shining in the sky. I marveled at your creation on the way to the chapel. The sweet smell of the sanctuary greeted me as we who had gathered sat in your presence offering our solemn and subdued praise. In darkness we sat, keeping watch with Christ. Thank you for your continual watch and protection.

As I left in the calm of your presence I saw your stars again. I laid down on a bench and gazed up at them. Thank you for hanging the stars in their place. Thank you for being bigger still. Thank you for loving me.

Thank you for two pieces of toast and a shower. Thank you for the opportunity to pray with a community of brothers twice before the sun rose.

Thank you for eucharist with real wine.

Thank you for work periods of reading with me about spiritual direction. With your presence on my shoulders, your arm around my neck and the smell of frankincense and myrrh still in my senses, the warmth of the spiritual director’s relationship was abundantly clear.

Thank you for lunch and introducing me again to the prayer of examen. I wonder how open I dare be in blogging my prayers and how much I must hide away.

Thank you for seven times today praying the hours to the dulcet chants of the brothers.

Thank you for a bowl of cabbage soup for supper and listening to the history of Hotels in america being read to us.

Thank you for the sweet dreamlike peace you have given me today.

Thank you for the consolations of the animals. The ridiculous sounds of shrieking dear and cackling turkeys; the friendly cats who jump on any available lap, and for the humming bird that visited me.

Still amidst the joy I have felt some disquiet as well. Even as I thanked you that the humiliating events of yesterday didn’t cause me shame - the suggestion that I play the guitar outside didn’t cause me to be at all defensive, that the whole dinning hall was waiting for me to finish an apple before saying a closing prayer, or the fact that my pants had split when I fell over at vespers didn’t even make me blush - but even as I thanked you today for your grace at those times, I felt the empty sting of shame.

As I walked down to the library I passed a young woman, and I noticed an anxiousness. I wanted to be seen as attractive to her. For that reason I felt embarrassed and avoided her.

My thoughts wandered often today, thank you for bringing them back to you. When fatigue and boredom set in (that was a lot of reading!) the feeling of your presence left me. Thank you for being there in spite of my feelings.

I realized when I was first thinking about examen that I spent as much time using the rosary ring I made as I had hoping someone would notice it and ask about it. So I took it off. There was a rosary in the chapel by the statue of your mom. Did miss having it once when I longed for you and didn’t have your likeness to touch.

Thank you for what you have shown me today. Give me grace for tomorrow to live with you and avoid the mistakes and missed opportunities of today. Be with my family at home and bless them. Thank you for bringing Foster and Ella to mind as we prayed compline. I thought of all the times we prayed those psalms together in their room. Maybe next time I’ll chant them. What a nice lullaby.

Pentecostal Foodstuff

“For us, therefore, religious experience is to spiritual direction what foodstuff is to cooking. Without foodstuff there can be no cooking. Without religious experience there can be no spiritual direction” (Spiritual Direction in Practice 8).

Barry and Connoly give the work of spiritual direction as drawing out those times in life when God is interacting with the person they are directing. This means that the directee has to have had some kind of religious experience to draw on. Some prayer to discuss, maybe not even formal prayer, but the opening of the heart to God and experiencing him.

This got me thinking of the conversation I had with Dallas Willard. He wrote that the ecstatic experiences we Pentecostals cherish don’t build character. They are for something else, namely ministering to the body of Christ.

But they do provide religious experiences to draw on. A dutch reformed pastor who is on retreat with me related the story of a friend who went to the Toronto Airport Vineyard church during it’s famous revival. He went with his Ph.D. adviser as a sort of anthropological experiment. He even reluctantly went to be prayed over, being goaded by his adviser to study it. Those praying over him prayed some very specific things (like we experienced when we experimented with Spirit directed prayer during our January retreat). He was even “laid out” by the Spirit.

He now has that experience of the Spirit moving in his life to remember and know that it is real.

Perhaps those goose-bump moments and the excitement they produce do not by themselves develop character, but build faith and become the foodstuff for later spiritual direction.

Day one at St. Gregory’s Abby

I slept some as the train trundled over its tracks, swaying slightly, rocking me. When my eye lids spread apart, my gaze was captured by the mists that hung over the low hills. Young Dawn’s fingers streching out to gild them - making them shine in sacred twilight.

My mind was still cloudy, sleep was a forgotten lover and the day ahead a stranger. My mind all too readily remembered my true love left on the train platform, our children in her arms waving to me. I remember Foster’s body trembling like a leaf after a freight train roared by the waiting passengers, a bully taunting us with its icy wind.

“Daddy, I don’t want to ride on the train any more, All right?”

He couldn’t come this time anyway. This journey was for me alone. Just me and God - a solitary retreat. Do I really want to do this? I asked myself, thinking of home and family. No, I’d go home if I could, but I’m on my way.

A brother from the Abby met me at the train station. If my misapprehension frightened me on the train, his driving taught me to trust God completely.

Today I’ve prayed the hours with the monks. They chant so softly that I am amazed at the breath support required. Times in the chapel are peaceful, so wrought with the presence of the Holy that I shutter, like Foster before the might of the freight train.

The meals are simple an slight. We sit in silence listening to a reader regale us with the history of Hotels in America. That the monks would engage such an unrelated subject, reminded me what I had studied on the train, that Spiritual Direction is about finding God in all things.

After vespers and supper I hiked around the lake with my guitar and a book. I finally settled in the cemetery on a bench. I sang “This is my Father’s World” as wild turkeys and deer circled. As I was reading my book I heard a twig snap and turned to see a young deer looking at me. My face, the flash of my glasses, so startled it that it screamed and ran away. It actually screamed. It would then creep up on me, when it was within about 10 yards it would stare at me and scream repeatedly. It was like a barking dog. It was the strangest thing I have ever seen from a deer.

It is 9:30 and I am going to bed as soon as I pray compline. Matins are at 4:00am!