It’s always time to remember who we are, what we value most, how to listen for the Divine, and discern the next right action. At this moment in US history, assaults on the most marginalized and on the earth itself, presses us to tend to these questions with a particular sense of care. I’m clear that I need to do this on my own and with good company, with sacred conversations.
How timely to have completed the Spiritual Guidance Program this month! While inclined to tending the holy, the program exposed me to big ideas about approaches to contemplation and discernment across time and traditions, and offered opportunities to practice and reflect on approaches to spiritual guidance. First off, it dared me to recognize more fully God’s lavish and ubiquitous love for me and each of us, and all the cosmos. And while I’ve attended to spiritual practices over time, I have new language and examples of wisdom figures from different centuries who I will continue to learn from, as I draw upon their life experiences and wisdom on the bookshelves Shalem helped me fill.
How comforting and challenging to join with another person as their heart seeks the Divine, to know that every month or so, that sacred space awaits for just that purpose, just two of us. It is something to anticipate and reflect on, and best, savor in the moment, as together we go on the lookout for God in the directee’s life and longings. It humbles and delights me.
To support this new path, there have been many other resources. I have a fabulous peer group, with whom I’ve grown as we regularly ponder and practice and pray our way into this ministry together. And we’ll continue beyond the program – hurray! A staff contact person is another important resource. And the wide-ranging faculty are at the ready for questions we raise from a range of faith traditions and intersectional identities. The possibilities for sacred conversations are greater than I’d imagined.
The rich dimensions of the program came to mind again and again as I visited the special exhibition of Beato Angelico’s work in Florence. He was a Dominican friar and artist known for introducing new ways of capturing the sacred at the start of the Renaissance. He opened up the sensibilities of others at the time by capturing the life of Christ with images that were more realistic and full of movement than the art of the Middle Ages. Even the fruit and flora are captured with botanical precision. But beyond his innovative techniques and mastery he endures as one of the greats because his works express a deep faith and call to contemplation. He encouraged individual reflection, shown by his painting a scene from Jesus’ life in each monk’s cell at the Monastery of San Marco in Florence, where he was abbot. But he didn’t focus exclusively on solitary prayer, as he painted for sacred, public spaces. And he showed that contemplation was not just an individual act. His Altar for the monastery of San Marco is a great example.
Mary and Baby Jesus are on a throne at the center, in their stillness and wisdom. Angels flank them while they engage with one another. In the middle left are two evangelists, John and Mark, turned toward one another with their scrolls and quills, their vocations made plain.
Saint Dominic, Peter of Verona, and Francis of Assisi, three wisdom figures are clustered together on the right. They are not there in solitary silence. Instead they hold present the Divine as they have sacred conversations, sacre conversazioni.
Almost six hundred years after he completed it, it feels as if Fra Angelico is offering me spiritual direction. I imagine that he’d want us to engage the story in order to enter our “spiritual heart.” How are those huddled groupings reflecting on Jesus in the world and their own callings? What discernments are they contemplating? What insights might they offer one another? Are they considering their roles in the world, as the Renaissance created dramatic shifts in society, as the Baby Jesus holds up an orb that represents the world? What does that image prompt in me? In you? What do the imaginings of their sacred conversations prompt? And more broadly, what does Beato Angelico’s faith laid bare make me wonder about manifesting my own faith?
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There are as many prompts for contemplating our capacity to grow in love with God as there are works of art, musical compositions, scientific inventions, baby toes, blades of grass, quarks, human experiences. To grow in noticing and embracing them is a life’s work. I’m so grateful to have spiritual companions and to grow in my capacity and to be one. And I’m grateful for this program which has dared me to tend to both.