$50 at the end of the school year got me to a silent retreat and offered me the opportunity to experience something I’d never experienced before: a supportive enough environment to just shut the hell up.
15 of us slept dorm style, walked a nearby trail and encountered parts of ourselves we hadn’t likely seen in decades. Some tapped into the divine – source, God, nature, something wild and unfettered, but also still and nutritive. With this inordinately privileged bit of time I wrote a lot. I took the time to read, stare off into space and not say a single word for three days. Here are the things I learned:
You can’t outrun your past
The evening started with a meal and full-fledged NOISE. We were exorcising pent-up energy, nervousness; gelling with our neighbors, soon to be quiet comrades in some sort of sensitive soul journey. After filling our plates, I sat next to a woman I’ll call Susan. Susan started off by saying that she was trying better to not reveal all her dirty laundry to everyone she met, but proceeded to tell us what was on her mind, culminating with a sharp, brusque
I have a thirty-year-old daughter who thinks she knows everything.
These words revealed much to me immediately. About Susan, and secondarily about me. The words pinch me even now. That sentence was the defensive tail of a spurned mother who, as I later found out, hadn’t talked to her daughter in a number of years and was still ruminating on her wounds. I have very little contact with my own mother and immediately felt something move inside me like the flesh of a fresh hangnail.
I moved away from her. Ate somewhere else.
Silence descended and I couldn’t stop thinking about Susan’s cynical and heated words. She was wounded, so was I.
And for the following three days I ran into every single possible sign that had to do with mothers.
In fact, the more I tried to push the concept of mothering out the window and into a ditch, the more it came back muddy and roaring in my face.
I went for a walk in the moody spring air, sitting on a bench for a breath. The bench was dedicated to “all mothers, but especially mine.” I cursed God in that moment, feeling the prowl of this mother beast’s breath on my neck. I later opened the book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, at random, only to encounter a take on the Ugly Duckling that examines the shaky foundations of those who go out into the world unmothered.
Reflection talks, given by our facilitators – evoked mothers and grandmothers. Everywhere I looked, there were mothers.
You can convince yourself that you’re over something. You can desensitize yourself for the benefit of getting through your days, your weeks and years, but all of us have a core wound and history that we cannot flee from. And having only silence to answer my justifications forced me to radically confront the fact that I believe that I am somehow unloveable. This is a nasty root to continually draw from.
Human love is imperfect, so you might as well learn to live with that
Okay, full admission: I work at a Catholic, Jesuit institution and the crux of this silent retreat is based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. If you want to stop reading, I get it. I am a cautious semi-believer – not in Catholicism per se, but some spirit that motivates life and aspires for connection. For as fuzzy of an equivalent as this sounds, I am very much of the belief that if a God exists, it is a God of love. This is, in part, the gist of this retreat, named by the facilitators as “Loved into Being”.
So, I’m wrestling with some big life things – some core wounds that came up unexpectedly in a conversation prior to entering silence. I’m granted a conversation with an advisor each day, where we discuss what came up for us during our silence. I couldn’t avoid the elephant in the room: I have some BIG feelings about my mother and the lack of love from her.
These weren’t therapy appointments, but simply someone to mirror, prod, unfurl the whirling dervish that is your thoughts, heart-stirrings and inner landscapes.
I am still grappling with the response of my advisor, with the central thesis of this retreat: that God loves me exactly as I am. Unconditionally.
Phew.
Again, I get it if you need to bounce. This is pushing into sticky territory for me, too. But –
I once believed this. I cherished and yet was overwhelmed by this idea. I still am. I don’t even know what it means exactly, but! I came away from these conversations, from this very idea as sort of liberatory.
I can acknowledge that I am loved. I can also see that human love is deeply and irrevocably flawed. Mine too. Many of us are doing our best, but unconditional love is rare. Spiritual love, however you find it, is meant to be loving in totality – unreasonable, unfathomable. The thought of something loving me unconditionally (as bonkers as that assertion is) is kind of offering me a sort of freedom I didn’t expect.
I don’t have to expect complete and total love from other humans. I don’t have to be disappointed when it falls short of my exacting expectations. This is actually good! I can potentially free myself from these expectations, which, if we’re honest, only seem to torture ourselves and hurt others.
And…religion and spirituality are attractive because of this vulnerability
Of course there were warning bells. Because my system was so powerfully affected by this realization, and I consider myself a mostly educated, critically thinking person, I had to check in with myself.
The vulnerability of being unloved can make us susceptible to systems that take advantage of this belief. This is the primary driver of all marketing: devices and pills and creams to make you live forever, because maybe if we live long enough we can actualize a perfect and unwavering love. A sense of belonging.
While the retreat facilitators used Christianity as the root, I wasn’t pressured or evangelized to. For every die-hard Catholic in our midst there were several agnostics, filthy pagans (me) and the spiritually curious. We gave them a barometer check on where we stood on the spiritual/religious before the retreat, so each meeting had the foundations of our self-reporting in mind.
I didn’t disguise myself. I was honest and used the words “filthy pagan” and “scientific animist” to give a rough approximation for where I stand on the spectrum. Had my facilitators been more forceful, this divine love as perfection rhetoric would have shuttled me back to earth to stay for good.
Since my colleagues are rooted in the Jesuit tradition, there is an emphasis on discernment, examination and careful study. Because of this, I know that I am encouraged to find my own way. My way isn’t the way of the Catholic church, but I have been guided back to some personal, original precepts, some conditions of the heart that made me glad and a little more whole.
It’s a miracle that people continue to wake up everyday and put one foot in front of the other, and we should honor that – for ourselves and others
Toward the end of our time together, the 15 of us plus our three facilitators joined in a seated circle. We were to share one thing about our experience over the past three, silent days. I kept mine light – sharing how nice it was to be in the presence of all of us before we went silent – being able to witness everyone’s personality as we ate, laughed, conversed.
But many of us expressed a profound sense of grief. When Susan’s turn arrived, she recounted, through a cracked voice, how meaningful the time had been, and that she had written letters, warm, loving, kind letters to her daughter, the daughter she hadn’t spoken to in a long time. She stressed that the letters weren’t angry – and I think Susan started the retreat angry, and hurt. The hurt was still there, but it found itself smaller. Some small pebble had dislodged itself a bit, and she seemed a bit freer.
Initially Susan had dredged a lot of powerful feelings up in me. Stuff I had to reason through, question, sit with. The silence of the past three days afforded me a rigorous confrontation with what came up.
Hearing her voice, seeing her eyes swim with something softer as she explained what happened for her – I was reminded: we all carry so much inside, everyday. My discomfort with Susan morphed into an imperfect empathy. She was, we are, hurting so very much. The very best thing we can and so rarely do is give one another the grace that could make or break a shaky trajectory toward healing.
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