One
It is about a three-hour drive, door to door, from my apartment in Chicago to the parking lot at Christ in the Wilderness. I made this trek for the first time just a week or so after Holy Week feeling no different, I suspect, from many of the other souls who somehow manage to drag their tired, overcommitted, ridiculously stressed-out urban selves to the welcoming presences of Sister Julia and Frank, the caretaker of 80 beautiful acres in the hills of Northern Illinois.
Please don’t misunderstand. I am crazy about the city. It is a place where you can witness spectacular acts of random kindness and jaw-dropping cruelty and everything in between. And all of it on any given afternoon on the same Number 36 Broadway bus. Today, for example, an old bluesman climbed aboard the bus, blessed us all, and then quietly sang the most lovely gospel song until his stop. When he got off the bus, people cheered. The lady in front of me muttered, “Amen.” The bus driver told the old man, “I hope you ride this bus on my way back up.” All this and free concerts in the park by world-class folk singers, marvelous museums, Lake Shore Drive, great hotdogs and really cheap, really wonderful Thai/Ethiopian/Somali/Fill-in-the-Blank food. It is the place where my husband Jorge and I began to carve out our life together, and where our son Hank was born.
Still, I am basically a small-town girl transplanted to the big city. I miss stars and sitting on the porch to look at them. I miss pricking up my ears when a car comes down the road after 10 p.m. I miss walking in the woods for hours at a time. Most of all, I miss silence—or rather, I miss being in spaces where the only noise is the bickering of two Jays, or the wind nudging and whispering at blades of prairie grasses, or the busybody clucking of a turkey somewhere in the woods, close by. To hear these things you must be very, very quiet. To listen to the wind, the breath of your Creator, you must be quiet.
Two
But I had not been quiet for weeks, maybe even months. What I had been was increasingly impatient and ill tempered with Jorge and Hank, with my dearest friends, even with my dear old daddy back in Texas—in other words, with my loved ones. So worn down had I become by the business of living—paying the bills, scaring up freelance gigs, teaching classes, getting the boy to and from school and his various activities, being a helpmate to Jorge, occasionally stepping up to the plate to help a friend—that I had not been able to pray or write or read for many, many weeks. I had even stopped listening to music, which is always a warning sign that I need to hightail it into a place of solitude for a few days.
The writer Annie Lamott has famously quipped that, really, she has only two prayers. The first goes like this: Help me, help me, help me. And the second goes like this: Thank You, Thank You, Thank You. But I was so far gone that I couldn’t even properly say my thank you’s anymore. On Sunday mornings in church, I most often prayed for one thing: a little perspective.
Three
Frank met me in the parking lot and I pulled from the trunk of my car my overnight bag, a sack full of books and notebooks, a draft of my novel, my laptop, and a pair of hiking boots. We loaded these onto the back of his ATV. We also loaded up enough food to sustain me for at least a week, though I had only scheduled a three-day retreat. If solitude got to be too much for me, then at least I would eat well. I chattered without cease in the brief time it took us to load up the ATV and take the brief drive up the very steep hill to my hermitage, though I don’t remember exactly what I said. Perhaps I told Frank all about my Big Plans for my retreat, about all the things I had to do. On this, my first retreat to CITW, I had only three days to pray and get quiet, rest, read my book, develop a plan for the next draft, walk in the woods, read a friend’s new collection of short stories and, oh yeah, pray and get quiet so I could listen to God.
I recalled reading in the CITW literature that three days was really the least bit of time one ought to plan a retreat for, and I recalled reading in Pat Schneider’s wonderful book Writing Alone and With Others that one really begins to see the benefits of retreat after about eight days. Eight days!, I thought. Boy, I could really catch up on some things in eight days!
Frank gently set my things inside the screened porch and showed me a few details about the hermitage—how to turn on the heat, if need be, where to find the coffee filters. He showed me the little desk near the window and the rocking chair next to the bed. He told me when Sister Julia would return, should I need anything, and he folded his stiff frame back into the ATV. I found myself wanting to shout after him: Wait! Come back! You want a cup of coffee?
Four
In his book Making All Things New, Henri Nouwen writes
To bring some solitude into our lives is one of the most necessary but also most difficult disciplines. Even though we may have a deep desire for real solitude, we also experience a certain apprehension as we approach that solitary place and time. As soon as we are alone, without people to talk with, books to read, TV to watch, or phone calls to make, an inner chaos opens up in us…This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediately shut out all our inner doubts, anxieties, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings, and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distractions, we often find that our inner distractions manifest themselves to us in full force” (cited in Richard Foster’s Devotional Classics, pp. 95-96.).
Depending on who you are and where you are from, solitude can be a pretty scary experience. I grew up in Texas, in the 1970s and 80s, a place where being alone meant that you were either a shabby old eccentric or you didn’t have anybody who loved you. It could also be a deeply dangerous experience, particularly if you wandered out into the desert by yourself. For women and girls this was especially true. To this day, none of the women in my family will go to a movie or dinner by themselves, and being “by myself” is something to be avoided at all costs. As a little girl who loved to both read books and write stories, both deeply solitary activities, I remember feeling a fair amount of confusion about solitude, about what it meant to be alone.
As a young woman living in Arizona, I often spent days at a time camping alone in the desert—in places with big views and big quiet and night skies that would knock your socks off. Back then, I was estranged from the church and I would not have identified my need for solitude as a need to get quiet and listen to the voice of my Creator. But though I would not, or could not, have named it as spiritual seeking, I now understand how deeply compelled I was, even as a young woman, to walk alone in the desert and sit for a while and be quiet—and “Listen…to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart…”
Five
There is a deeply irreverent bumper sticker that I see around the city from time to time. “Jesus is coming. Look busy!” Generally it amuses me, but on closer inspection I find myself wondering: Might it be possible that, while busy-ness and the dangers of idle hands and whatnot certainly have their place in the lives of the faithful (and, really, all of us), there is also a real danger of failing to stop and pause, maybe even to allow a few things to fall by the wayside, so that we may take the time listen to our Merciful Creator? What if it is a sin not to spend some time sitting in a chair, staring into space and watching the prairie come back to life after a long, hard winter? What if it is a sin to not seek solitude regularly? What if one of the most important ways that we, to quote the old country song, “get right with God,” is by setting aside the busy-ness of our lives and handing over our time to our Lord?
I’m no theologian, so I might be on shaky ground here. But I wonder.
Six
I wandered around the hermitage, unpacked my things, eyeballed the writing desk and made a cup of tea. Then I sat down on the porch and watched the birds for a while. Really, I had so much to do. But once I was in that chair on the porch with a cup of tea in my hand, somehow it seemed more important to stay put. It occurred to me that I had been moving around—both internally and externally—for a really long time. Sort of like an ant, only less purposeful.
St. Bernard said, "If you are preparing the ear of the spirit for the voice of God, a voice sweeter than honey and the honeycomb, then flee external cares; so that when your inner sense is disentangled and free, you may say with the prophet Samuel, 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening' (I Samuel 3:10). For the voice of God does not speak amid the din and bustle of the world, nor is it heard in any public gathering. Rather secret counsel seeks to be heard also in secret. And so because of this, happiness will be given to us if we listen to God in solitude" (cited from “The Practice of Silence and Solitude,” opusangelorum.org).
I think of Samuel’s moment with God from time to time. 1 Samuel 3:10, in its entirety, reads thusly: Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” In this story, Samuel is able to hear the Lord and the ensuing revelations, perhaps, because he listens to the Lord. And yet it can be very hard to listen when one is caught in the world’s “din and bustle.” For my part, I walked myself down to the lovely little chapel next to the stream and sat myself down in a chair. I commenced to explain myself to the Good Lord in the clearest and plainest of terms, as if my Creator were a basically well-intentioned but deeply disorganized professor. “Lord,” I began, “I’ve got a lot I need to do in these three days…” I explained my plan for retreat in great detail, not once thinking of good King Solomon and his wisdom in Proverbs: “Where words are many sin is not wanting” and, afterward, I listened attentively. Your servant is listening!
What I heard was the profound silence of the chapel, a bit of wind pushing against the door I had left ajar, and a birdcall, unfamiliar to me but sweet and simple and clean as a plainsong, a mockingbird perhaps. I closed my eyes and a single word came to mind. It even came with its own punctuation. Quiet!
Seven
Because I visited CITW at the end of April, the birds had returned to the Midwest in all their noisy glory. Minute by minute, they created a messy and complicated symphony outside the door of my hermitage. Two enormous Jays had commandeered the feeder, and a couple of exquisite little Indigo buntings hovered around the perimeter, moving in when the Jays weren’t paying attention. Red-tailed hawks hovered above elegantly above it all. Flowers that I am completely incapable of naming were just starting to bloom—tiny purple blossoms peeping at the edges of everything, everywhere. The weather was lovely. We were blessed with warm and sunny days, nights cool enough to warrant a light sweater. There were the usual threats of rain, as there always are in the Midwest this time of year, but neither I nor the turkey that fussed somewhere in the woods, close by, seemed to take them very seriously.
I read on the porch or stared into space. Sometimes, I watched the cloud float by. Occasionally, I walked over and poked my head into the brush just to see if I could spot the turkey, whose racket was persistent, but the little creature always quieted immediately. It was starting to occur to me that perhaps my whole approach to this retreat had been—how to say this gently—completely wrong.
Nouwen writes, “Solitude is not a spontaneous response to an occupied and preoccupied life. There are too many reasons not to be alone. Therefore we must begin by carefully planning some solitude.” One of the best reasons I can think of to avoid being alone is that, if you haven’t made a habit of solitude, and if as an artist you haven’t fully embraced (or you have forgotten) the necessity of what bell hooks’ in her discussion of the poet Emily Dickinson called “radical solitude,” then you come to a retreat expecting far too much from your time there. In short, you expect the retreat to answer all the Big Questions of your life—gaining a profound understanding of “time management,” earning a living while keeping your creative life alive, staving off the demons of acedia. Worse, you also expect that retreat to solve all the Big Problems of your life as all.
I felt this keenly. In the words of The Avett Brothers, folksingers and occasional theologians, in their song Ill with Want, I had come to CITW “sick with wanting / and it’s evil how it’s got me / and every day is worse than the one before… Something has me acting like someone I don’t wanna be, / acting like someone I know isn’t me.”
Eight
At some point in the middle of my second day, it occurred to me that I had not yet sat down at the work desk in the other room, though I had done a fair amount of reading and praying and walking. I sat on “my” porch at the hermitage, listening to the wind move through the prairie and watching the prairie return to life after our long, long winter. I walked in woods for hours, just as I used to do in the desert when I was a young woman. There are wonderful trails through the woods, solitary places to sit and watch the deer eating the old corn left on the fields after last year’s harvest. There is a beautiful old metal combine rusting away in the woods, its scythe rendered harmless by time and decay. And if you are very, very quiet, you can hear the gentle burbling of the brook from just about anywhere on the property.
At end of the second day, after watching the sun set over God’s rich and bountiful creation, I said my thank-you’s and headed back to my hermitage for a little light supper and reading before bed. I slept for nine hours and woke up feeling better rested than I had in months.
I had not realized how tired I was. |
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