Volume 20, No. 1-Winter, 1996
Table of Contents
The Dance That is Shalem
by Shelly Webb
Becoming Who We Are
by Rose Mary Dougherty
Shalem's Internal Structure Change
by Diane Paras
Are We Having Fun Yet?
by Gerald May
Inner Authority
by Hilda Montalvo
Icons of the Vine
by Glenn Mitchell
The Accommodating Silence
by Tilden Edwards
The Dance That is Shalem
by Shelly Webb
"Arriving now in the wilderness, in an uncertain place of solitude, accompanied by unbiased spiritual friends,I have drawn forth this song of separation for the fulfillment of myself and others." - Tulshig Rinpoche
While working at Shalem one early November afternoon, I suddenly remembered that I needed to learn to waltz. I was to be a member of a wedding party the coming weekend, and it was going to be a very formal affair, the type that required a certain knowledge of dancing that I was lacking. Starting to panic about this, I immediately turned to my Shalem co-workers, called an emergency business team meeting, and laid out the situation for them. I was instantly granted an obvious solution to my problem. Tilden Edwards, executive director of the Shalem Institute for over 20 years, is, among many other things, an excellent dancer. The business team advised me to put on the dress that I was to wear for the wedding (which had conveniently arrived that day) and ask Tilden to show me the basics of an acceptable waltz.
I went to put on the long, velvety dress and a pair of heels. The business team moved chairs and tables out of the way to clear some space for an impromptu dance floor. Several of them joined in creating background music; all that was needed was the instructor. I found Tilden, explained to him, quite simply, that I needed to know how to waltz and had heard he was an expert dancer, explained that the dance floor and music were ready, and asked if he would teach me. Tilden laughed, put down a disheveled stack of papers, and said he would be happy to. After a brief explanation of the concept of the waltz, he began to lead me in an amazingly graceful way across the floor. The background music soared and the office furniture spun as he invited me into a perfect waltz.
When I reflect on this experience, I am struck by it on two levels. On the first level, it fills me with joy and wonder to think that I was lucky enough to spend a year working at a place that would take a mid-afternoon break for a cooperative and impromptu waltz lesson. After graduating from college in 1991, I had spent three years working in D.C. at wonderful though exhausting jobs for a social service agency and an Episcopal Church. I was accepted into the Masters of Divinity Program at Harvard Divinity School and was supposed to begin in the Fall of 1994. However, deep Wisdom got ahold of me (despite my best efforts to avoid Her), and I decided to defer for a year. The job opening at Shalem was a gift handed to me (perhaps from Wisdom, who was glad that I had finally gotten the message to slow down and create some space for God in my life). Shalem was looking for a one-year transition person to act as the receptionist as they restructured their staff. I was looking for a one-year job where I could be accepted as the limited, broken, exhausted, loving person that I was. I began working at Shalem in September of 1994, and my time there was graced by many mornings and afternoons of pure joy, pure gift.
On the second level, waltzing that afternoon with Tilden, taking part quite literally in the dance that is Shalem, filled me with a deep appreciation for what we can hope for in our relationship to God. We can come willingly to the dance that is life, accepting God's invitation to us, while simultaneously inviting God to be both our partner and our instructor. I had accepted the invitation to the wedding, and I was wanted there; however, I also wanted to be able to take part in the dancing, so I asked Tilden to be my dancing partner and to teach me.
God, I feel, issues an invitation to all of us to be in relation to God. That is pure gift, available to all of us. If we choose to respond to that invitation, we are choosing to show up for God and vulnerably open ourselves to the enormous depths of pain, joy, and ultimately freedom that that relationship inspires. We ask God to be our partner and our instructor, trusting that we too will become proficient at the dance-not in the sense of being "good" at it, but in the sense of being at peace with the movement of our lives. For me, the year with Shalem was a time of trusting God's invitation to accept myself for where I am and who I am.
In reflecting on this mutuality between God's open invitation and our choice to learn the dance, I am reminded of the Zen saying that "Enlightenment is an accident, but some activities make us accident-prone." Dancing with Tilden that day was pure grace, but the background music, the cleared-out dance floor, and the invitation to him were the events that ushered grace in, just as wisdom's call to me to take a year off and create some space invited the gift of working for Shalem. As I start my three years at Harvard and who knows what after that, I will remember the dance that is life, that afternoon of waltzing gracefully, effortlessly, across the floor of a place called Shalem.
Shelly, now a first year student at Harvard Divinity School, still comes back to visit when she is in town.
Becoming Who We Are
by Rose Mary Dougherty
Several months ago I had what I have come to call "my recurring dream." I've had the same dream periodically over the past ten years. In the dream I am young and I am going to several personal wisdom figures, asking them if they think I should enter religious life (which I did some thirty years ago). In retrospect, the dream has always seemed the herald of some change in my life, some invitation to be issued, a decision to be made. The "entering religious life" always has to do with my going for God very intentionally.
The dream several months ago was a little different. I was still wondering if I should enter religious life. I was approaching the same people for answers, but as I came to each of them, I knew it wasn't right to ask them. Then I saw a little boy, three or four years old, with large brown eyes. I asked him my question, "Do you think I should enter religious life?" He looked at me with piercing, puzzled eyes. Finally he said, "Do you wanna?"
I awoke from the dream smiling and at peace. It was all so simple. For years in my dream (and probably more often in real life than I care to admit) I had wanted someone else to tell me what to do, to give their answers to my questions. This little child was the only one who had asked in this dream, "Do you wanna?" In asking this, he had called me back to myself, had invited me to listen to my heart.
For some of us, listening to our hearts, to our "wanna's," can seem like a selfish thing. It implies ignoring the needs around us and just doing what we want. I have come to believe, however, that listening to our hearts, to our "wanna's," brings us to the core of our being, where we are most authentically ourselves. In that place, we can hear God's prayer within us. We can sort through all the needs and expectations around us and choose, among all the things we might do, what fits with whom we are in God.
Some of us have been taught to make our life decisions by answering the question, "What would Jesus do if Jesus were here?" Jesus would do what Jesus would do. We must do what we must do. Jesus demonstrated this truth: When the mother of the sons of Zebedee came to ask him a favor, he asked: "What do you want?" When Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, cried out, "Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me," Jesus didn't presume to know what he wanted. Instead, he asked, "What do you want me to do for you?" When a few disciples began to follow him, he looked them squarely in the eye and questioned: "What do you want?" When he was with them, he invited his followers to listen to their hearts. When he was about to leave them, he promised them the Spirit of Truth who would "guide them to all truth." The same Spirit of truth and authenticity that animated Jesus animates us. We need only listen.
This listening is not easy. It requires a trust that there is within our hearts an inner wisdom that we only need to seek. The point of being in the company of a guru, a wisdom figure or even a spiritual director is not to be given that person's truth but rather to be led inside to our own.
The danger of reading the lives of the saints or being excessively inspired by holy people is that we can tend to mistake their path for ours. We may try to emulate them without reference to our own inner calling. We may take on spiritual practices that have no bearing on our life in God. In effect, we may relinquish authenticity, our true greatness in God, for the sake of a false self, an image we have created of whom we should become. Perhaps that is something of what Thomas Merton meant when he said: "Many would-be saints never become saints for the same reason that many poets never become great poets. They are too busy trying to write the poetry of other poets."
If Thomas Merton is right, and I think he is, what is it that would-be saints can learn from other saints? What can we learn from gurus and wisdom figures? Perhaps what we can learn is that they are single-minded. They have discovered and lived the truth of the gospel imperative, "Those who will save their lives will lose them, but those who lose their lives will find them." They have been willing to relinquish everything, all images of themselves and expectations of others, even all dreams of ever becoming great, for the sake of finding themselves in God. They are great simply because they are ever becoming themselves.
Yet the greatness of the saints lies not in their doing; their greatness lies in their response to LOVE which ever beckons them and empowers them to love. In the end, their greatness lies in their willingness to relinquish all for the sake of LOVE, to be united with LOVE. In this oneness they come to an all pervasive love-for themselves, for the world, for all creation.
Perhaps the invitation of the saints to us is the invitation to LOVE. The "how-to's" of our response must be ours, however. There are generic means available to us--tried and true practices that others have found valuable--but we must test these for ourselves. Nobody else can respond to the uniqueness of our invitation.
The "wanna's" of our lives have much to tell us. They give us glimpses into who we are and what is really important to us. When we can listen deeply enough to these, beneath the enticements to success, or fame, or greatness, we will hear the voice of LOVE, Inner Wisdom, questioning us: "What do you want, what do you really want?" As we live our response to this question, we are empowered to become who we really are.
Shalem's Internal Structure Change
A Call To Teams
by Diane Paras
Spirituality in the workplace can be a challenge; sometimes it calls for change. Here at Shalem, it called for teams. Teams are an organizational structure that is non-hierarchical. We moved toward this change because of our own growth. During Shalem's history, programs and projects steadily increased, and staff were added to support them. Two years ago, as we celebrated our 20th anniversary, the Board of Directors decided to take a fresh look at our mission statement, and we embarked on an envisioning process to examine what we were doing and what it called from us for our future.
From this process we realized that we needed to change our internal structure. Though Shalem was born with a typical hierarchical structure, our growth made it cumbersome for one or two people to be in charge of all Shalem's activities. Also, turnover is very slow, and employees were eager to contribute more to the ministry. We needed to make room for their gifts. But it wasn't only that calling of the employees to contribute more to Shalem that caused our organizational change. Nor was it only that we had gotten too big for the structure of our early days. The real impetus was much more radical. Praying together, "practicing the presence" together, we saw each other as equal persons in the sight of God, and it gradually became essential to make this spiritual view of each other as equals manifest in our workplace.
So we became three teams. The Business Team is made up of administrative staff who work closely together to coordinate all aspects of running Shalem. The Program Team, or full-time program staff, takes responsibility for program envisioning and projects. The Executive Team--the working Board that meets once a month--stewards the overall health and future of Shalem.
Though not always smooth in the transition or the adjustment, we feel we've been very successful. Productivity is high, morale is very good, commitment to Shalem's mission is deeper than ever. Everyone on staff desires and is expected to pull his/her weight, to be responsible for her/his own sphere of expertise but also to pitch in and help in other areas of the organization.
We believe we recognized the need for this change and were able to accommodate it because of the contemplative dimension of our time together. As a praying community, listening in unison to God's call, spirituality in the workplace became more than a topic of conversation, more than a shared desire. It was our struggle to function in the workplace contemplatively that brought us to the team structure. Only by taking an open, flexible, and trusting stance could power and responsibility be shared to such a great extent.
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On Giving Away Power
Patricia Clark
My first experience with the team approach, although I didn't know it at the time, was about five years ago when I was on retreat. As usually happens, I took my life problems to work out, including some about Shalem. I did a lot of journaling, made discernment charts, etc., and suddenly one afternoon found myself kneeling in my room on the floor, praying to Teresa of Avila, my saint of equality and mutuality.
I've never knelt alone willingly on the floor before or since and can't remember if I prayed to Teresa or if her image came to me. She was silent, and yet I knew she was there as a vision of friendship and mutuality. I took it as a sign with no clarity about action and began to see my whole spiritual journey to be about power and control. I had mistakenly for many years projected this out as taking away power from others or others giving up power so I had more. Teresa, however, seemed to be leading me to be the one to give up and surrender, showing me that what was to be given to others was to come from me. But I was minimally conscious at this time that giving up part of my salary might be what was symbolically needed.
After several years of struggling with this, talking in meetings about gardens (where all flowers have beauty) and levelling the playing field, I found myself eyeball to eyeball with my colleagues on the Business Team, knowing my higher salary was a key point, that Teresa definitely had this in mind, and now I needed to do what the team wanted in its heart. The night before a crucial salary meeting and what it meant as a team, I went home, prayed and got real clarity about my security, that all was possible in a world full of God's abundant love, and that I need worry about nothing. This was not an ethereal feeling; it was very practical and solid. I knew what I could give up financially. The team came together the next day and worked out a formula using the salary money of the team to be divided in a new way recognizing equality of responsibility, the value of each person's gifts, experience and longevity. The formula matched my practical prayer answer exactly.
Though this was a shaky time for me, now after about two years, I see it as key to so many things about real trust for me as to God's leadership in my relationship with money, power and self-image. Every day I am led to more relinquishment of self-image and power (as viewed by others) to know a true image of love, giving and compassion as known by God. I am indebted to the team and my friends, true spiritual companions, for their unconditional love throughout this process.
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Six Months on the Team
Emily North
Shalem's team structure was evident to me from the beginning. Most of my job interview questions centered around the qualities needed to work as a team, such as flexibility, willingness to be accountable, good listening skills, but just as important were issues around spirituality. In both interviews the team wanted to know about my spiritual journey: what is it about? am I actively seeking God's presence in my life?
At my first staff prayer, as I observed how people related, I was amazed by the care and love they showed each other. Whether they shared insights or prayer concerns, there was a corporate lifting up of the person to God's care as she or he spoke. It does not mean there are not tensions or personality clashes, but there is a genuine attempt to see the Divine within each person.
What does this have to do with working as a team? Everyone's contribution is counted as essential to the well-being of the organization. There are no assumptions of rank or status, though obviously there are different roles. I am not the executive director and I cannot take Tilden's place, but my job as local programs registrar is as vital to the running of Shalem as a program director or fundraiser. I also influence and contribute to other aspects of Shalem through meeting with the team and helping out in areas where there is need. I know my opinion counts and I am asked for it, am expected to fully participate in all meetings I attend, and even though I am the newest member of the staff, am not "stuck" with the tasks no one wants to do.
My six months here have been the best work experience for me in terms of organizational structure and morale, and I believe Shalem's desire to be present to God has resulted in empowering its employees in a way that is seldom seen in most work settings. Shalem is not a perfect organization, but being open to the presence and work of God provides fertile ground for extraordinary results.
This team development project was aided by a grant from the Lilly Foundation. A full project report is available upon request from the Shalem office.
Are We Having Fun Yet?
by Gerald May
Again, may the following journal excerpts be a thanksgiving to you who were so much with me during my treatment for lymphoma.
August, 1995
In cyberspace I have met an angel-friend. Her name is Lucy and she's been in treatment for cancer for over a year. We correspond by e-mail. We started out joking about our baldness, but she's become a profound spiritual friend; she knows the trials and graces of this trail so well.
I'm sensing the pattern of how each 3-week chemotherapy cycle makes me sick, then compromises my immune system, then gives me a few days of recovery before the next round. Something about this reminds me of Bosnia. My last hospital roommate told me he was dying. "I lost the battle," he said, "but you gotta keep on fighting." People tend to think of it as a battle, but I don't. I have no animosity toward my wayward cancer cells, can't see them as enemies. Lucy doesn't either.
No fighting.
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September
I've been sick so many times now: hospitalized, transfused, medicated, but always I feel my strange gratitude and God's incredible closeness, and I'm always aware of the love and prayers of so many people. Yet I wonder, "With all this love and prayer, how come I feel so terrible?" Lucy calls the suffering, "God's kiss." Together we hatch an image of our bodies being canoes, needing to be hollowed out for God. And I've begun to realize that each time when I'm suffering the most, I receive a special Wisdom-gift.
For example, I came away from my last hospitalization knowing that all prayer is participation in God, and that God is so intimate, so essentially who we are, that any real participation in life is prayer. I don't meditate any more, and it no longer makes sense for me "here" to pray to God "there." But I still do pray for things. I'm praying a lot for my skin. It itches, flakes, hurts, blisters, weeps, sheds and is so frail I bleed from the corner of a paper matchbook puncturing my finger. I'm taking on a decidedly reptilian appearance. I'm molting, and I don't want to see the creature that will emerge.
Worst of all is the ego-pain of not being able to do things.
I cried over the cancelled wilderness retreat. And I sat on the kitchen floor and sobbed when my arms were too weak and fingers too numb to fix our jammed garbage disposal. I told Lucy and she understood. We call each other brother and sister now; I'm her big brother when she's feeling lousy, her little brother when things are bad for me. Now I'm little brother in my grief of not-being-able-to-do. How much I have defined myself by doings! God doesn't give a hoot about accomplishment, but oh, how I hate to be incompetent! I can't stand screwing up!
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October
I have a dream about screwing up. I'm at a ranch, and I've ridden the ranch-owner's horse all day. When I return, the owner is furious with me for having worn the wrong kind of boots. He says my boots rub against the horse's skin and create sores. I feel terrible for unknowingly hurting the horse. But the horse himself is winking and giving me this big Mr. Ed grin. I go to him and he puts his great soft mouth up against my ear and I hear, "Don't worry. I'm fine. Look and see." Sure enough, he has no damage anywhere. I wake up softly, deeply relieved.
My last cytoxan injection comes at the end of the month and I'm scared. The previous ones were "high-dose," and this will be 60% more. Still, a deep part of me is looking forward to the experience, certain that God will have a very special gift for me there. The time comes, and it is indeed bad. Friends and family come, and I can't talk straight to them. I am barely aware of their presence; they are ghosts by my bedside. I don't seem to get any profound message from God. As I begin to feel better I suddenly realize I did get a message, or at least the first half of it: "You don't have to always be suffering for my Wisdom to come to you. In fact, I like it much better when you don't suffer at all!"
I've had a choking cough every night for weeks now. Suddenly I realize the problem: I'm breathing flakes of skin that collect on my bedclothes. I'm choking on my own skin-flakes! I lose it then, sobbing and quivering and hopeless, and right then the second half of God's message comes: "What we're really here for is fun!" Don't ask me to explain it, but it gives me the giggles. Coughs and nausea, pain and giggles, sobs and memories of Bosnia all flow together and I somehow know that yes, the meaning of life is fun. I want to answer, "Well, are we having fun yet?" But I'm choking on skin flakes and giggles. Later I tell Lucy, and she understands. Is there anything she doesn't understand? Yes, she doesn't understand deer hunters.
I am overwhelmed with God's love for her.
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November
Immuno-suppressed after the cytoxan, I get an ear infection that would have killed me if the doctors hadn't insisted on my return to the hospital. I'm on morphine as the Bosnia peace talks begin in Ohio. The final six weeks of treatment are with Interleukin, a "natural" body chemical that stimulates killer cells to clean up leftover tumor fragments. I was warned it would be rough, but I never expected such complete incapacitation. All I can do is lie in bed. I thought I'd learned about doing and being, but this is a whole new level. This is total non-doing, and I hate it.
I've lost touch with my gratitude and God's presence. Strange, but I am not too troubled by the loss. And I have a glimmer that my own presence, simple and alone as it seems, is a bit of God's Presence. My mind, grasping for some image of productivity, starts fantasizing about building a workshop in my basement. Gradually it becomes an obsession.
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December
Flowers and notes arrive from the Winter Retreat participants and I cannot bear to look at them. Then my Interleukin dose gets decreased, and I'm able to get up and around a little. I go down into my basement and do tiny things to begin the workshop. It's only for a few moments at a time, but I love it. Lucy asks what I'm going to build with my new workshop. I have no idea. I feel Zen-like, building a workshop that builds a workshop. Just bare creative potential. God is smiling. Yes, we are having fun. The Bosnia peace agreement is signed in Paris. In the mornings I have the energy to work on my wilderness book. Then, on the winter solstice, I take my last Interleukin injection. My treatment is finished and there are no signs of lymphoma left and I discover that the wilderness book is also finished. I love it. I love everything and everyone, and there is nothing but bare creativity everywhere. And so much fun.
Inner Authority
by Hilda Montalvo
It has been said that the task of this era is to go from "the experience of religious authority to the authority of religious experience." The invitation to those who desire to live authentically is to trust our own experience of God, to discover our gift and call in relationship to ourselves, our community and our God. It is not an easy task, and it is always ongoing. It demands courage, openness, trust and the willingness to abandon judgment of "right and wrong."
Many years ago, when I was starting my spiritual journey, I had a recurring dream that someone very close and dear to me was dead. It was my task to keep pushing her back into the coffin and reminding her to stay dead. My terror was indescribable. I interpreted this dream according to traditional Roman Catholic spirituality that I had to die to myself. For me this meant that I had to put everybody else's desires and wishes before my own. Finally, I realized that by doing so I was giving myself away inappropriately. When I started the arduous process of acknowledging, accepting and loving my true Self in God, the dream never returned.
There is no doubt that dying to self is primordial in the spiritual life and is, in fact, the invitation of the Paschal mystery. The problem is the definition of self. What has to die is our false self, the ego, the "persona" that is formed by cultural expectations, the importance of image and "should's." The false self tries to live up to some external goal. The true Self, on the other hand, is made in the image and likeness of the Trinitarian God. We experience this Self as the interface between the finite and the infinite.
I have been helped tremendously by the writings of Beatrice Bruteau, a contemplative Christian philosopher who has integrated Eastern nondualism with Christian dogma, myths and symbols (see her books Radical Optimism and What We Can Learn from the East plus her articles, "Symbiotic Cosmos," in The Roll and "The Living One: Transcendent Freedom Creates the Future," in Cistercian Studies). Bruteau proposes that the true Self in God is simply "I am." Any predicate or description that follows this "I am" is merely ego.
We cause ourselves problems when we identify with the predicates or definitions that follow our "I am." These predicates must die or at least be very loosely held. One technique that is very helpful in this respect is one that I experienced at Shalem. I sat knee to knee with another participant. For five minutes she responded to my descriptions of myself (i.e., I am a woman, I am Cuban, wife, mother, grandmother, lazy, intelligent, etc.) with a compassionate, "God is merciful." We then switched roles. That God could be merciful toward my sinfulness or negative traits was understandable and desirable; that God also was merciful for my gifts and cherished accomplishments was hard to take. That was insightful, but the experience that radically changed my point of view was identifying with the God of mercy and experiencing God's grace flowing through me. For those few moments I rested in God's love for the other and allowed God to love the other in and with and through me.
This is the deepest meaning of "I am." Bruteau asserts that, "The contemplatives teach their pupils that at the center of our consciousness we contact the Infinite, and the goal of our spiritual practices is to experience ourselves as situated there, at the center, in touch with the Infinite, looking out on, in, or through the finite" (Radical Optimism). This is metanoia, the radical reversal of our point of view, not looking toward God, or working for God, or searching for God's will, but living from God, with God, in God.
From this stance one does not experience God as Other, as Martin Buber's "I-Thou," but as "I-I," two subjects united in self-donative love. To live from God as it were, is the invitation to live contemplatively, not looking at God but believing and trusting Jesus' words, " ... that I am in the Father, and you in me, and I in you" (John 15:20).
The inner authority that comes from living from this contemplative stance results in incredible gratefulness, spaciousness and freedom. Because we identify ourselves primarily with the God that "sources" our being, our doings or our ego definitions tend to be held lightly and with a sense of humor. Because we are not vested in being right or different or special, we can learn from others, cooperate and co-create the kingdom of God. We can share our truths and be present to others without fear of losing ourselves in them. We can live in the Trinitarian balance of intimacy and autonomy, receiving everything from others and giving everything in trust and love. This description may sound very idealistic and even unreal. And from the ego stance it is. But as Bruteau writes, "Our actions flow from our attitudes, and our attitudes flow from our perceptions, and our perceptions are molded by our assumptions, our faith .... Change your faith and you will get a new world" (Radical Optimism). Inner authority, then, flows from the conscious experience and choice of living with God, in God and through God. This is our faith.
Hilda is a graduate of Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program, Class of 1987, a wife, mother, grandmother, who currently resides in Florida.
Icons of the Vine
by Glenn Mitchell
I am struck by how critical context is for the spiritual guide, and the many ways our own perspectives and prejudices, our own spiritual histories and biases can come to bear on the listening and guiding that we do with others. Though it is important to learn what we can about the particular contexts that are presented to us through our directees, to know the different ways women and men come to transformation in their journeys, the impact of divorce upon spiritual work, or the dance of friendship between the sexes and the deepening of spirituality, I also feel the importance of stripping away as much of the psychological and sociological contexts as we can (granted that often the best way to strip is to first recognize and understand) and center our souls on the God of all contexts. Contexts are critical, but we need to recall over and again that our primary work is to be present to God for the other. It is to that end that I undertook my photographic essay, Icons of the Vine.
All of the photos are of grape vine tendrils, mostly wild grape tendrils, which are very common. They appear as new growth on the vine every year, and every year, after their time of growth, they dry out and in their hardness preserve something of the green vine's grace. They are everywhere there are grapes. Abundant. However, they are mostly not seen, not noticed. Their context is often obscured by their ordinary nature. They don't stand out like a flower or hold value like a bunch of purple grapes hung ripe to the eye and delicious to the palate. They are often camouflaged by the rest of the vine and what lies around them. Like a weed waving in the winter's wind, their value is of no consequence.
What I have done in the photos is single them out for attention. I have opened my eyes to their existence, pulled them in from the edges of obscurity; honored their presence with my lens; isolated their singularity from the multiplicity of their environment. By the careful composing of their form, I offer the assertion that they matter, they matter greatly. In a manner, I have given voice, given expression, to the unique gift of their individual pattern of movement in this world.
In the passing glance they might attract on the vine, a tendril is a tendril; but in the closeness of the lens, in their silhouette against the white, in the dance of shadows, the depth of each tendril comes alive powerfully. Each one, in a sense, becomes an icon, a window through which the Creator is more fully revealed. Suddenly a tendril is no longer a tendril, no longer even the object of adoration but the opening through which the holy takes shape. The commonplace becomes the sacred as connections between these shapes and the shape of the crucifix, the Madonna, the dancer in praise, catch the eye, race the heart, and raise God to the fore. Something as simple as a dried vine tendril can open us to the mystery of God in Christ, in creation, in ourselves and others. It shows us the manner in which all of creation can open in us songs of praise to the Creator, and I think holds something of what Jesus had in mind when he spoke of the metaphor of vine and branches. It is what is implied in his assertion that if the disciples were silent even the stones themselves would speak.
Every day, as directors and guides, we see people who stand before us like tendrils. Each is set in his/her own context; each is often camouflaged in ways that invite us to see the ordinary, to see what others see--to type, to box, to categorize--to pass over the singularity for the commonality. In our attentiveness, in our prayerfulness, in our moving close, we honor the uniqueness that God has planted in the other, we invite the voice that gives expression to what is essential in this one's walk with God. The movement of each person's life becomes an icon set before us, inviting God's presence to shine through our day.
I envision having these photos on my desk, praying with one or more of them before each directee session and allowing the uniqueness of each image to set the context for the preciousness of the hour ahead. Part of my prayer would be that the simplicity and singularity of the image might help strip me of all pretentiousness; might free me from my own compounded nature, so that I might come freely to God with the same starkness of heart as carried by the black and white images. And always I would pray that the graceful lines of the tendrils might invite my own graciousness in the coming hour, that the lines of our conversation might circle again and again toward the One whose image we carry, that whatever rigidity of heart and life is revealed might soften in God's gracious light.
The photos on this page, and elsewhere in this issue, are taken from Glenn's photographic essay. Currently on sabbatical in Nigeria, Glenn did his photographic essay for the Shalem Spiritual Guidance Program, Winter 1995 class.
The Accommodating Silence
by Tilden Edwards
During a recent Shalem retreat, a woman told me that over the years of our encounters in person and in writing she recognized that "her soul speaks the same language as my soul." She said there are other people in her life like that too. I know that this is true for me as well (and I suspect for most people): There are certain people with whom something deep inside resonates when I hear the way they talk about the mystery of the divine. This is not the response of my emotions, physical attraction, or conceptual ideas. It's as though some more hidden dimension of my being rises up and recognizes the same quality of spiritual reality in the other person.
On the other hand, there are people who do not speak my soul language at a given time. When they speak of the divine, the words don't ring any bells inside. The same is true when they hear me. Sometimes this can be due to our words not being connected with any deep experience in ourselves: They are conceptually understandable words conditioned in us by our reading and thinking, but they do not connect with any first-hand awareness and this is apparent to the other person. Or our words may be coming from our own deep experience, but it's just very different from the other person's experience. At still other times the words may be coming from an unconscious drive to protect our security rather than coming from our yearning and listening for the Real One; the words fall flat--they do not ring true to the hearer who is moved to stretch beyond self-securing. In all these cases, even if we are using the same theological language, the words coming from the other person sound like a foreign language to our deep souls. We just don't connect.
Even if we cannot directly connect with another's language, the honing silence helps us recognize a distant echo of the same Spirit that is touching us. The silence allows us to recognize one coat of many colors, a community of mutual respect for the one divine Mystery alive in our midst. We come to sense that all our languages (whether rationally verbal or charismatically expressive) only skirt the edge of this living Mystery. We cannot exhaust it with any language. The silence keeps us linguistically humble at the same time that it invites us to recognize a finally speechless spiritual heart that unites us before and through any language that emerges.
What would the world be like if everyone consciously shared such a living "heart-space" as such a silence allows? Could it help us sense a common ground deeper than our often lonely languages about spiritual realities? I trust that God is at work in each of us in distinctive ways, and yet beneath the disparate languages these differences produce, I believe there is a common ground, a kinship, that when recognized allows us to live fruitfully together and to challenge one another with our differences without needing to demonize or kill anyone. Shared silence open to the holy depths can give us room to appreciate this true ground of human community.
One of the great values of people coming together with the intent of silent openness to God is that the silence can accomodate and deepen all our languages. The silence becomes a common ground, a democratic space that accepts every soul language. In that hospitable space we can more readily come to trust that God is mysteriously at work through all the languages. At the beginning of Genesis we find God's Spirit sweeping over the formless void, giving birth to the forms of life. In the beginning of the Gospel according to St. John, the invisible divine Wisdom/Word takes form, taking flesh for us, full of grace and truth. When our language is formed out of the deep, open silence, hopefully we speak from the divine Spirit's radiant creativity in us; we incarnate the soul's invisible movements in felt words and images.