Sunday morning coming down … the last day of retreat is for final talks and final goodbyes. Some people linger as long as possible while others pack up early and are eager to return to home, family, work, and/or civilization.
The vast majority of retreatants are making promises to themselves and/or others to return again. There are many goodbye hugs and well wishes shared.
Today’s senryu: Last Day of Retreat
renewed spirits and
relief to move forward – yes
impermanence is
The six-hour drive home includes a lot of debriefing with car mates that had similar yet different experiences than you. Since retreatants are assigned living quarters by gender and meditation groups by chance, it’s very likely that each traveler has a different perspective on what was their favorite part of the retreat.
Fr. Richard Rohr, and his staff, remind us that “Now, in the last season of my life, I realize that what’s in front of me is still largely darkness—but it doesn’t matter anymore.”
God asks only that you get out of God’s way and let God be God in you. —Meister Eckhart, sermon on 1 John 4:9
Father Richard describes the spiritual discipline of detachment as the practice of “letting go”:
In the larger-than-life people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died—and thus they are larger than death, too! Please think about that. At some point, they were led to the edge of their private resources, and that breakdown, which surely felt like dying, led them into a larger life. They went through a death of their various false selves and came out on the other side knowing that death could no longer hurt them. They fell into the Big Love and the Big Freedom—which many call God.
Throughout most of history, the journey through death into life was taught in sacred space and ritual form, which clarified, distilled, and shortened the process. Today, many people don’t learn how to move past their fear of diminishment, even when it stares them down or gently invites them. This lack of preparation for the “pass over,” the absence of training in grief work and letting go, and our failure to entrust ourselves to a bigger life, have contributed to our culture’s spiritual crisis.
All great spirituality is about letting go. Instead, we have made it to be about taking in, attaining, performing, winning, and succeeding. True spirituality echoes the paradox of life itself. It trains us in both detachment and attachment: detachment from the passing so we can attach to the substantial. But if we do not acquire good training in detachment, we may attach to the wrong things, especially our own self-image and its desire for security. [1]
Each time I learn to let go of what I thought was necessary for my own happiness, I invariably find myself in a larger place, a larger space, a deeper union, a greater joy. I’m sorry I can’t prove that to you ahead of time. We only know it after the fact. I used to read every book I could as a young man thinking if I understood good theology, good philosophy, good psychology, I’d know how to live the so-called perfect life and it would show me how to open the door in front of me. Now, in the last season of my life, I realize that what’s in front of me is still largely darkness—but it doesn’t matter anymore. That’s because letting go has taught me that I can look back, not forward, back at the past of my life and I can truthfully say, “What have I ever lost by dying? What have I ever lost by losing?” I have fallen upward again and again. By falling I have found. By letting go I have discovered, and I find myself in these later years of my life still surprised that that is true. [2]
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 199.
[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2010).
Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) born November 30, 1835, in Missouri and died April 21, 1910, in CT, at the age of 74 from a heart attack. An American author most known for his classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1885.
Known for his humorous and insightful quips, here are a few of my favorites:
“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
“When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old.”
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
The world’s most famous theoretical physicist (E=mc2), Albert Einstein was born March 14, 1879, and died April 18, 1955.
“On 17 April 1955, Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which had previously been reinforced surgically in 1948 …
Einstein refused surgery, saying, “I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.” He died in the (medical center) early the next morning at the age of 76 …
Einstein spoke of his spiritual outlook in a wide array of original writings and interviews. He said he had sympathy for the impersonal God of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy. He did not believe in a personal god who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naïve. He clarified, however, that “I am not an atheist preferring to call himself an agnostic, or a “deeply religious nonbeliever”. When asked if he believed in an afterlife, Einstein replied, “No. And one life is enough for me.” …
In a memorial lecture delivered on 13 December 1965, nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer summarized his impression of Einstein as a person: “He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness … There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
Judy Cannato was an American Catholic author, retreat facilitator, and spiritual director. She died from a rare form of cancer in 2011, at the age of 62. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judy_Cannato.
Fortunately, before her death, she gave us these encouraging words:
“[Jesus] engaged death with every bit of consciousness and freedom that were his, and what we all discovered as a result is that death—while inevitable, while altering our dreams and causing us to let go of everything—does not have the final word. There is always—always—resurrection. And what is resurrection for us, in the context of the new universe story? It is a transformation in consciousness, an experience of transcendence in which we live out of the connectedness that is our truth. As we continue to evolve in consciousness, continue to emerge as more and more capable lovers, we share in the resurrection of Christ. We not only walk in the Light, we become light for others. Even little resurrections that come after choosing to die to fear and egocentricity release the Spirit. When we engage in a lifetime of death and resurrections as Jesus did, we become ever more empowered to do the work God asks us to do.
Life and death are a single mystery. That is what the Paschal Mystery teaches us. Death is inevitable—but so is resurrection. We can be sure that dyings will intrude upon our lives, and we may have some choice about how we can respond to their coming. We can be awake and watchful for the resurrections as well, for the creative ways that new life streams into our lives even in the midst of death. Like supernova explosions that shatter every recognizable fragment of life [and scatter elements for new stars], we are capable of transcendence, capable of never allowing death to have the final say.”
Judy Cannato, Radical Amazement: Contemplative Lessons from Black Holes, Supernovas, and Other Wonders of the Universe (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2006), 122.
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Judy’s words remind me of the often-quoted wedding ceremony quote: “Now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:13.
What is the difference between the three? “Faith is grounded in the reality of the past; hope is looking to the reality of the future” and love is understanding and acting in the present moment. https://www.gotquestions.org/difference-faith-hope.html
Presbyterian pastor Rachel Srubas writes of the paradox at the heart of Good Friday and the three-day “triduum” of Holy Week:
Jesus anticipated his arrest, passion, and entombment, calling this triduum “three days and three nights … in the heart of the earth,” and likening it to the prophet Jonah’s journey “in the belly of the sea monster” (Matthew 12:40). Thomas Merton, the brilliant contemplative writer of the twentieth century … also wrote of Jonah (or as Merton and others have called him, Jonas). In The Sign of Jonas, … Merton said, “It was when Jonas was traveling as fast as he could away from Nineveh, toward Tharsis, that he was thrown overboard and swallowed by a whale who took him where God wanted him to go…. Even our mistakes are eloquent, more than we know.” [1]
A sense of sacred irony, of eloquent mistakes, has for centuries enabled Christians to call the Friday of Jesus’ tortuous execution “good.” This is not a matter of putting a happy spin on a grisly, unjust tragedy. Good Friday, and all Christian life, is about embracing paradox. Jesus’ teachings and his death reveal sacred contradictions. The truth that you and I may try to avoid, the pain we’re loath to face, point the way toward our freedom from captivating lies that perpetuate our suffering. When you and I embrace Jesus’ essential paradox—that to lose is to gain and to die is to live—we come to God, who gathers up the broken pieces of the world and makes them more complete and beautiful than they were before they broke. God integrates all fractious dualities into the wholeness of life that Christians call eternal salvation. It’s a life we get to live here and now, by grace and faith. It’s the life toward which Lent has always pointed.
Like Father Richard, Srubas considers the cross a “collision of opposites” that leads us deeper into reality and the presence of God:
Following his jubilant entry into Jerusalem (which Christians celebrate on Palm Sunday), Jesus told his disciples, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:23b–24). Pay attention to that pivotal unless and understand: without the fatal fall, no glorious resurrected life can be lived.
From this divine paradox, it follows that there can be no compassion without passion, no responsive loving-kindness unless there first comes suffering. Until God ultimately mends all of creation’s broken pieces, there will come suffering.…
“You will know the truth,” Jesus said to those who trusted him, “and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32). By his clear-eyed honesty, Jesus revealed holy, ironic wholeness. Denying pain would intensify it but facing hard facts of life and death would lead people deep into reality, the only place where God eternal can be found.
[1] Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1953, 1981), 10–11.
Rachel M. Srubas, The Desert of Compassion: Devotions for the Lenten Journey (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2023), 167–168, 169.
Image credit: A path from one week to the next—Jenna Keiper, North Cascades Sunrise. Jenna Keiper, Photo of a beloved artpiece belonging to Richard Rohr (Artist Unknown.) McEl Chevrier, Untitled. Used with permission.
On this day in 1941, Virginia Woolf committed suicide by drowning in the river behind her house. She was feeling the return of massive depression. She wrote a love letter/suicide note to her husband. Her writing was often controversial and, so it might be expected, that even her suicide note would be misquoted, misinterpreted and misjudged.
Today’s senryu: Those vs. These Terrible Times
life can be cruel
inside and outside our mind
stop judging – be kind
There’s an excellent piece by Maria Popova on The Marginalian website that provides an explanation of how “self-righteousness is the enemy of compassion.” And, as might be expected, the “self-righteous” ones include so called “Christians” and “journalists.” This piece also recommends the book, Afterwords – Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf, edited by Sybil Oldfield, (c) 2005, Rutgers University Press
Are you ever impatient with impermanence? Does time marching on ever bring solace? Is life itself exasperating? Just three questions on a Friday morning resulting in three senryus linked below.
Life Matters 