Retreat Reflections

A little while ago I went on a five-day silent retreat.

As retreatants we were encouraged to attend the daily prayer sessions in the chapel.  During one 6pm time, I watched some redwinged starlings perched on the eaves of a building to my right, quietly sounding their liquid call to each other. But all of them sat facing north, as did we in the chapel, all looking out onto a field still golden with winter foliage, down to the willow trees beginning to show their slim spring green, up over the poplars sporting ghostly white last season leaf stragglers, and away to the ridge and the darkening sky above.

The view, the birds, those in the chapel, all quietly focused on something beyond ourselves. Yet united. Receptive. Ah, so is this part of what is meant by “In Him we live, and move, and have our being”…. All things…. Focused away from our small ego existence, focused outward, attentive to God.

At times I would sit outside, watercolours in hand, and paint a little something that caught my attention – this leaf, that seed pod, a stone. These were moments of absorption – intent as I was on trying to render faithfully what I saw, while responding emotionally to the entrancement of what I saw, the marvel therein. Caught up again in a focus on this Something beyond myself, yet somehow quietly part of it, sitting there in that golden field, or amongst the many fallen leaves and twigs as I painted the newness of the spring growth from last year’s stem of the poplar twig.

 A stance which a friend by chance called contemplative. A moment of contemplative prayer, actually. A description I have come to view as apt. One for which I am grateful as it seems to fit what one does with the ability to render something on paper – to practise art-making. You honour the Giver of the gift by marvelling and recording in this way, using the gift as the medium to do so. How do you describe elegantly this gifting? Because gifting it is (as Lewis Hyde mentions in his book The Gift) whereby the artist becomes the custodian of this artistic gift. 

Furthermore, as recipient of the gift, how do you relate to it? As I understand the argument Hyde builds, particularly through his referencing of Meister Eckhart in the third chapter of this book, I am left with the astonishing impression that you can let it transform you into its Source.   To me this implies a co-operative surrender to the process of becoming Godlike – becoming a truer image of the Creator. Which reminds me of James Finley’s statement in Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, that “No matter who we become, we are nobody. For in the ground of our being, we live Christ’s life.” So that fundamentally, we grow towards living from a far greater Source than anything our ego can dream up. How glorious is that!

And thus, a gentle, encircling kenosis between Giver and Gift Receiver can ensue with the One pouring out itself for the other, and the other returning the emptying of itself by using the received gifting as a means of worship of the Giver, in this particular context, through a quiet act of contemplation. I desire that. And am therefore eager to continue softly with brush in hand, recording, marvelling, being present, slowly becoming in the process, that kind of nobody of which Finley speaks.