Volume 30, No. 3-Fall, 2006
Table of Contents
The Caller
by Rose Mary Dougherty
Prayer Circles for Peace
by Patience Robbins
Seeds of Peace
by Carole Crumley
Open Your Hand: The Practice of Spiritual Generosity
by Margaret Bullitt-Jonas
Shalem--At It's Best
by Franklin Adkinson
A Gentle Breeze
by Tony Sayer
The Caller
by Rose Mary Dougherty
A friend recently gave me a photo of Gerhard Marcks' statue erected in Germany--a mendicant looking man with eyes and mouth open wide, hands cupped to his mouth. The title of the statue is The Caller, and Marcks chiseled into its base the words, "Friede, Friede, Friede," or "Peace, Peace, Peace." Later, when the statue was moved to another location, new words were added: "I walk through the world and call peace, peace, peace."
Each time I look at the photo, words from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "Inversnaid," come to mind:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
...Crying 'What I do is me: for that I came.'
I say more: the just man justices...
Acts in God's eyes what in God's eyes he is....
The Caller, it seems to me, is acting in God's eyes what in God's eyes he is. Eyes wide open in the place where he is, he sees what is his to do and sounds his call for peace. And he doesn't let himself stay in one place. He walks through the world, perhaps only symbolically, guided by his heart's eye. But with each step he sees more, and he lives his call more fully.
The Caller is doing what you and I, and I suspect every person reading this article want to do. We want to live our fullness and speak the peace that is ours to proclaim, do the justice that is ours to do. We, too, want to be the manifestation of peace that is ours uniquely. What is it, then, that stifles us? What thwarts our living into that which we say we most want?
Perhaps for some of us our desire is not quite as strong as we would like to claim it is; it is not strong enough to motivate us. So we live this half-existence where we are neither happy nor challenged to step out. We live wearing the blinders of the comfort and safety of our own prejudices and perceptions so we don't need to see too much, relinquish too much, change too much. And we won't change much at all unless some cataclysmic event comes crashing into our lives, forcing us to see our choices for what they are.
For others of us the blinders are not a conscious choice but they are there and we only begin to realize it when we allow ourselves to be touched by the unfamiliar, the unbidden awareness of suffering, injustice, or whatever the unbidden might be for us. Once we realize that the blinders are there, we can begin to put ourselves in places where we will be given the opportunity to see more, to see clearly. And then the choices that are ours to consider begin to show themselves.
The difficulty for others of us is that we see too much, or at least we believe we do. We are bombarded with choices each day. We've heard words like Thomas Kelly's that not every cross is ours to climb upon, but we honestly don't know what our cross is. So we either try to take on too much, as though it were all ours to do, or we become paralyzed into non-action. Our blinders narrow our field of vision, making it difficult to see our place in the web of interdependence that assigns each of us our unique responsibility.
For some of us, the exigencies of our lives--young children, aging parents, ailing spouse, our own failing health--seem, in our eyes, to limit the possibilities for any substantial contribution to peace and justice. So we do what is ours to do, albeit with some disappointment, biding our time until we can do "the real thing." These blinders of self-deprecation or comparison with others prevent us from seeing that our faithfulness to life as it is at this time is our proclamation of peace.
Many of you could probably write scenarios which offer reasons why we cannot/do not live that which is ours to live. Yet the truth is that knowing reasons does not necessarily change our perceptions or our actions. Rather, the knowing often secures us in our inactivity.
Albert Einstein once reminded us, "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." What is needed, then, is an active willingness for a new level of consciousness and an active willingness to be changed. I think of the term courageous willingness, because, in fact, it takes great courage to relinquish things like privilege and power, or whatever may stand between us and our just actions.
Some of us may find that contemplative practice will be the way we choose to honor that which we want. The forms may vary, depending upon our leanings; however, all contemplative practices have certain common elements. All involve an openness to what is, to seeing ourselves just as we are, without trying to change ourselves or what we see outside us. They all involve a letting go of our own agendas to be present in the moment and a letting go of expectations of what will happen or should happen during our practice. They encourage us to cultivate a "don't know mind" that allows us to reverence mystery. All are ultimately about allowing the eyes of the heart to see freshly and clearly so that we might realize our true nature, our oneness with all, and act in justice for the good of all.
Zen sitting is a form of contemplative practice that I have found supportive. I find it particularly helpful to practice with others and do this twice a week. At the end of our evening sitting we chant a verse called, "Four Vows for All Creation," as an expression of our intent to carry our practice beyond the time of sitting and to live our interconnectedness with all of life. One line of that verse is, "Reality is boundless; I vow to perceive it." In this we make explicit what we implicitly want: Here, now, in this moment and the next and the next, we want to see what there is to see, we want to see with our eyes and our hearts so that we might know the action that is ours to take.
Perhaps there will come the day when we, too, each of us, will be the Callers right where we are in our world. Each of us will sound the uniqueness of our own being. And the truth is, that if we each did what is truly ours to do, if each of us lived/realized the fullness of who we are, there would be justice for all. Peace would be the air that we breathe.
Prayer Circles for Peace
by Patience Robbins
Right now there are about two billion Christians on the planet. If a significant portion of them were to embrace the contemplative dimension of the Gospel, the emerging global society would experience a powerful surge toward enduring peace. -Thomas Keating
"I am a cosmic citizen, a planetary being who lives in the Americas in the United States." This was a line shared by a teacher I had this summer. It sure blows open any narrow attachment to a certain country or geographical place and calls forth a whole new perspective on who I am related to and where I belong. This ties in so well with what I have been learning (and thus teaching) in my own life--the interconnectedness of all.
For years I have been quoting a line from Thomas Merton: "We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. What we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are." As I grow in the contemplative life, I continue to notice and experience the truth of these words--unity with others and the earth. In fact, now I am praying the question: How do we live out of this interconnectedness, especially as I notice that I often act, think and live as though I am separate, independent and self-sufficient?
One of my favorite people is Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived in a redwood tree in California for two years in order to bring attention to the destruction of the forest. In her book, "The Legacy of Luna" (which is about her tree-sit at the age of 25), she records a very inspiring transformational experience in which she gave over her life to God. She was willing to surrender her life, for good, for Love, for this deeper call she knew within her being. During this transformative time, she started noticing and experiencing her oneness with the tree, the ants, the birds, the people who were attempting to force her to leave the tree so they could chop it down as well as all the people who were supporting her. It is a very moving story of what can happen when we live out of our deepest self, available to God and experiencing ourselves as part of one living organism.
It is out of this conviction and reflection on this oneness that I woke up one morning recently with an image of "prayer circles for peace." These would be opportunities to gather in community, recognizing our interconnectedness, intentionally praying for peace, and encouraging one another to claim and live out this vision of peace in our hearts, our communities and our world. I was reminded of Gandhi's line: "My greatest weapon is mute prayer." Thus our deep desire and longing to embrace the gift of peace is what creates that possibility for ourselves and our world.
I have begun such a circle in my home Thursday evenings. As we gather weekly to sit for an hour of prayer, it may not feel or look like we are doing anything to aid the suffering and ease the hatred, violence, and destruction in our world, but there is a profound sense of holding the world and each other in a loving and compassionate way, of BEING love and peace for all that is.
So I continue to have hope and an ever deeper commitment to world peace along with a bubbling joy. I invite you to join me in acknowledging our oneness, being a loving presence for our world, and claiming and living into this vision of peace. Perhaps you, too, would like to start a "prayer circle for peace" in your neighborhood?
Seeds of Peace
by Carole Crumley
Shalem's newsletter editor told us that the deadline for submission of articles for this issue was September 11. We all moaned in a collective memory of the painful events of that day five years ago. Shortly after that conversation, I had a dream in which I was asking a heart-searching question: "Can we really hope to awaken the quality of peace in others' hearts? Is it possible to do this?" An answer came immediately as a clear strong voice spoke to me in the dream: "Yes, it is possible," the voice said. "Stay close to the fire."
"Can we really hope to awaken the quality of peace in others' hearts and in our own?"
It may seem foolish to even ask this question in light of the current realities of our world. Daily we are assaulted with images of people in other countries and in our own who are the victims of terrible, often random, violence. Wars rage and the fifth anniversary of 9/11 reminds us that Americans, like the rest of the world, are vulnerable to terrorism and violence. As violence escalates and fear of it multiplies, can we really hope to awaken the quality of peace in our own hearts, much less in others?
What can we do when we seem so far from what we yearn for?
"Stay close to the fire," the dream said, "Stay close to the fire." Stay close to the fire of your yearning, the fire of your desire, even the fire of your pain and sorrow over world events.
Nan Merrill writes that this kind of pain gave birth to her new little booklet, "Peace Planet, Light for Our World." Desolate, powerless, enormously disheartened after the events of 9/11, she says that her only solace was to sit in the silence and allow the indwelling Presence to become her prayer.
A friend gave her a prayer for peace that listed countries of the world. As she prayed over each nation every day, she began to experience these countries as friends. Then she started to locate each nation on a map and read about it. Little by little, Peace Planet emerged. Each page is dedicated to a different country with a prayer for its well-being and peace. Merrill says it was born from the heart-fire of her silent prayer--her prayer response to a world-wide horror.
I've read of a Native American tradition where one person's role is to remain at peace, centered in spiritual vision, no matter what events befall the tribe. Even if everyone else slips into pain, fear, or dissension, they can rely on this person, the vision-holder, as a lifeline to the Presence.
"I am burning with my desire for peace," a colleague recently told me. As a result of the events of 9/11, I believe the world is seeded with fire souls, young and old, who are holding a vision of peace for the future. As vision-holders, their prayers take many forms. Some folks walk their prayers, others set theirs to music, and some join circles of compassion for prayer-solidarity with kindred souls. Some offer their kindness and works of mercy, unheralded, to the force of peace. Others among us look deeper at the injustices that lead to fears and prompt violence. This year we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of Gandhi's "Satyagraha" (truth-force) non-violent campaign for justice in South Africa. His talk, which began this campaign, was inspired by a Muslim author and was given on September 11, 1906.
My twenty-something niece recently gave me a children's book about peace. It's one of her favorites, she said, because it describes so many simple ways to understand peace and is delightfully illustrated. "Read this to your grandchildren," she encouraged. She might have added: "Plant seeds of peace early in the fertile soil of young hearts. Trust the Spirit to water them and pray for a bountiful harvest."
Perhaps nothing is more important for our generation than staying close to the fire, the fire of the Beloved in whose image we are made. Moment by moment, this Spirit lives in our spirits, co-creating the "shalom," the authentic peace, the Beloved Community of God. As we pray for this in the heart-fire of silence, may God's will, God's love be done.
Open Your Hand: The Practice of Spiritual Generosity
by Margaret Bullitt-Jonas
I don't know anyone who doesn't wrestle sometimes with despair. News of the world is bleak. Global warming. Vanishing species. War. Terrorism. Poverty. It can be tempting to close the mind and harden the heart simply because the challenges that confront us seem overwhelming. What is hope in the face of so much bad news?
In a time of turbulence and anxiety, I believe that generosity is one of the key spiritual practices that can keep us sane. Not only that, the practice of generosity may be one of the most powerful ways that we can bear witness to a hope that lies beyond despair.
Here are three things that I am learning about the practice of generosity.
1) Generosity begins with God.
This means that we receive everything as gift--not just material possessions but everything that exists: this breath, this moment, and the moments we have until we die. Our capacity to think, feel, remember, and hope, our family and friends, the whole living breathing planet with its goldfinches and cougars, its foxes and salmon and birch trees--all of it is gift.
When despair knocks on my door, I remind myself of the generosity of God. I turn to God and give thanks for whatever gifts I am able to appreciate: perhaps just the breath in my lungs or how dearly God loves me. In the hour of dread, what I manage to be grateful for may be very small, but that little glimpse may be enough to open the door to gratitude. The more grateful I feel, the more that interior abundance naturally wants to overflow into acts of generosity. Because God is so generous to me, I want to be generous to others.
At the same time, remembering the generosity of God can be a wonderful antidote to compulsive giving, the temptation to think that I have to give and give and give without asking for anything in return. It's been said that compulsive giving can be a sign of pride, a refusal to accept help from others. So when I get over-extended, remembering that generosity begins with God helps restore me to humility. Like every creature, I, too, need to receive. Allowing oneself not only to give but also to receive from others and from God is like breathing in as well as breathing out--it is essential for life.
2) Generosity expresses kinship.
The root of the word "generosity" is the Latin genus, which means "race, kind, or kin." To be generous is to make others kin. This is a very different notion of generosity than what we might call patronage or "noblesse oblige," in which a powerful person or group of people deigns to share a little of its abundance with the poor and dispossessed but does not experience, or want to experience, any direct contact with the poor. Giving in this spirit can actually function as a power play, in which the rich congratulate themselves on their supposed generosity, while the poor remain dependent and disempowered.
True generosity expresses kinship. It recognizes that rich and poor alike are the beloved children of God, equally human and worthy of respect. Human societies tend to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few and to relegate the poor to the margins, but a religious vision of our kinship with one another calls us to a generosity that inspires us to struggle for social and economic justice and not to settle for offering charity and handouts.
Despair may goad us to seek security through isolation and fearful self-protectiveness. Practicing generosity undercuts despair by reminding us that human beings are essentially kin--we are connected to each other. We need each other.
And if generosity is all about kinship, maybe in this time of ecological devastation we are ready to expand our notions of kin to include not just our two-legged relatives but also the four-legged kind and those with fins and wings.
3) Generosity expresses and strengthens hope.
Take global warming, for instance. Many of us are shaken by the reports of melting glaciers and drowning polar bears, disrupted seasonal cycles and intensifying droughts and storms. We wonder whether it is too late to save the precious web of life that our species is so wantonly destroying.
Committing oneself to carrying out generous actions on behalf of Creation is a way to take a stand for hope: this is the sort of world we want to create, a world in which people live at peace with one another and with the Earth, a world that is socially just and environmentally sustainable.
When we skip one car ride a week, or buy locally grown food, or replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent, we are not just doing what is ethically right (though we are) and we're not just restraining ourselves or exercising self-control (though we may be doing that, too). We are also being generous, giving for the love of God and the healing of God's Creation.
When we are generous, we become a living sign of hope. And if enough people take a stand for hope, with God's help maybe we can change the world.
Margaret Bullitt-Jonas serves as priest associate at Grace (Episcopal) Church, Amherst, MA. She is the author of "Holy Hunger and Christ's Passion, Our Passions," and a 1988 graduate of Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program. This essay is adapted from a sermon preached in July 2006.
Shalem--At It's Best
by Franklin Adkinson
"The mission of the Shalem Institute is to be an ecumenical community responding to a call to help mediate God's Spirit in the world through the loving wisdom of contemplative tradition."
During the seven years I have been involved in the Shalem circle of Board and senior staff, we have been continually engaged in discerning where Shalem may be invited next. This prayerful process has intensified with the departure of our Founders and the emergence of new leadership. True to our tradition, "unknowing" abounds.
Out of Shalem's traditional mission statement, set forth by the Institute's founders, have come a myriad of programs and contributions over the past 35 years, which together comprise an appreciable legacy. We can begin with the writings and personal teachings, the spiritual leadership and the mentoring of our founding visionaries Tilden Edwards, Gerald May and Rose Mary Dougherty.
Also, starting with our Spiritual Guidance Program (with more than 1000 alumni) Shalem has developed unique residential extension programs to inculcate contemplative wisdom into the spiritual nourishment of clergy, business leaders, leaders of retreats and small groups, and individuals seeking personal spiritual deepening. Local and more recently regional programs and pilgrimages have enriched the journeys of many who seek the Way. Lives have been transformed, spiritual communities formed and sustained and the gifts received have been passed lovingly to many others. Mission accomplished...but not finished.
Recently some of us involved with Shalem have been considering how our discernment might be informed by some of the management principles set forth by Jim Collins in a new monograph to accompany his book, "Good to Great." Collins has now considered how his leadership imperatives might apply to "non-profit" and charitable organizations like Shalem.
It's an interesting and provocative read for anyone involved with not-for-profit organizations. I'd like to share one particular paradigm that I found intriguing when applied to Shalem's mission. It's called the "hedgehog concept." Briefly defined, it states that an organization's focus should always be directed to the intersection of three circles, representing your passion (core values), what you are best at, and what drives your "resource engine."
I have begun to consider what Shalem is "best at." What do we do (or can we do) "better than any other organization on the planet?" Is it to articulate contemplative spirituality? Is it witnessing to prayerful, contemplative living? Is it supporting others who seek contemplative wisdom? Does it involve our amalgamation of traditional teaching and experiential understanding that some say is the hallmark of our extension programs?
Who better to ask about what makes Shalem unique than our program participants? I am appealing to each of you reading this to take a few minutes to prayerfully consider this simple question, "What is the Shalem you know best at?" and then share with us your conclusions. Your response can be a few words, sentences, paragraphs, or pages, as you are given. Drop me a note addressed to Shalem, or use e-mail [ This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ]. Some brief reference to your past contact with Shalem would be helpful. I promise to read and pray with every response and to share what comes of this in a future issue of Shalem News.
Franklin is President of Shalem's Board of Directors.
A Gentle Breeze
by Tony Sayer
The theology of spiritual direction is a theology of silence. This insight was a gift to me from one of my directees, whom I will call Sally.
Before my second session with her, she requested that we spend most of the hour in silence. I agreed in a noncommittal kind of way. The truth is, I did not want to spend most of the hour in silence. I was avidly reading Thomas Hart's "The Art of Christian Listening" and had already discovered that I was a novice listener. I wanted to hear Sally talk so I could practice my listening skills.
As it turned out, we did not spend that hour in silence, but this seemingly minor and preliminary encounter with Sally has loomed large in my reflecting about our relationship, my relationship with God and my relationship with silence.
I wasn't thinking or reflecting about God when I had my encounter with Sally. I wasn't aware of God's presence. God didn't enter into it. Reflecting back, I see that I wasn't really even thinking about Sally when I had my encounter with Sally. I wasn't alert. I wasn't aware. I wasn't really paying attention. Basically, I wasn't open to an encounter with God because I was unprepared to regard my momentary contact with Sally as a real encounter with her.
But in fact it was a real encounter--with Sally and with God, who I now see was speaking to me and my condition through Sally's expressed desire for silence. God was right there in this seemingly unimportant exchange.
Why was I so intent on practicing my listening skills instead of actually listening? If I wanted Sally to talk, why was I so unprepared to listen when she talked to me about our next session? Why did I imagine that I could only listen to Sally, or to God, when she was speaking? Did I not grasp that I could listen to the silence and that such listening might be particularly fruitful?
I could pull from my readings many passages that speak to the value of silence as a practice that opens us to the presence of God, and I could pile up the helpful books that recommend silence as a Christian practice. But it is in fact this focus on silence as a practice that carries with it a possibility of misleading us or at least me.
The emphasis in most cases is on our silence: our entering into stillness, our creating an open space where we can encounter God. Silence is what we offer to God so that we might better hear what God has to say. We don't always acknowledge that silence, especially God's silence, can retain a quality of speech--can in itself be a kind of speech and perhaps the purest, most fruitful speech.
In Eleanor Abarno's article, "Everyday Theology," I found this: "Since what is articulated about God is grounded in a larger, ineffable, whole-self knowledge of God, we want to be respectful of what is not spoken.... We know more than we can put into words, more than we want to put into words. To honor a person's theology is to honor what he or she does not say."
Abarno seems to be saying that there is a grace, a courtesy, in the direction relationship that pays special attention and gives special honor to silence, and her words take on new depth in light of my encounter with Sally.
Sally offered me her silence, and I was unprepared to accept or even understand her gift. I was unprepared to acknowledge that Sally's silence might be a powerful way for her to reveal herself to me--perhaps as powerful, perhaps even more powerful, than her spoken words.
Sally's silence, and mine, and yours, and our ability to communicate powerfully and profoundly through what is not spoken, are grounded in God's silence, which is not only to be understood as the absence of God's speech, or even to be understood as the background of God's speech, but is in fact a form of God's speech, perhaps indeed the deepest and most profound form--though putting it this way should not mislead us into thinking that God's silence is, after all, not really silence. If, as Abarno says, "to honor a person's theology is to honor what he or she does not say," then to honor God is, in part, to honor what God does not say.
Let Elijah's encounter with God on Mount Horeb (1 Kings 19) stand for this understanding of the God who communicates through silence, whose purest speech perhaps is silence: God's whisper, God's murmur, "a still small voice," "the sound of a thin silence," "a sound of sheer silence." R.A. Herrera calls this the "theophany of a gentle breeze." The gentlest breezes are almost undetectable, can barely be felt--and make no sound at all.
Tony is a participant in Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program, Winter 2006. This article is an excerpt of one of his program papers.