A poem on retreat

One of the requirements of the Internship in Ignatian Spirituality is a silent retreat (at least five days). I have gone on silent retreats for more than thirty years, but several of the people in the program had not. Last year, one of them, Amy, happened to sign up for retreat the same time as I was going to be there, so I offered to meet her before we entered the silence and give her an orientation to the retreat house, the grounds and the neighborhood (for walks). Amy returned to Manresa Retreat House for retreat this year and sent me this poem she composed while on retreat, which she dedicated to me. I am so touched and honored.

Summer Solstice Psalm

For Madeline who introduced me to Quarton Lake

All creatures of our God and King,

Lift up your voice and with us sing.

Alleluia, Alleluia.

 (William Henry Draper with inspiration from St Francis)

May you open your self to the light like the lily that blooms in muddy water.

(a gem from my yogi friend, Sharon)

Light beams.

Geese swim.

Robins sing.

Fish flop.

Wood ducks lift

and land

and flap.

Herons stalk

and jab

and fly

with wide wings

oh so low.

Cottonwood fibers sail past on the breeze.

Metallic blue fireflies mate in midair.

A painted turtle soaks up the sun.

Walkers chat on a gravel path and side step               the geese.

In the surrounding neighborhood,

homeowners weed

landscapers mow

and earth movers dig.

Drills whirl.

Saws spin.

Roofers pound.

Huge houses emerge.

Down at the water’s edge, a pilgrim rests.

She spies a tiny black insect on a white petal.

Consider this lily

that bobs on the water

with the deep joy

that nudges our hips to sway

when we hum spirituals.

Amy Fryar Kennedy

June 21, 2022

Spring

Snow melts and reveals

what was hidden below ground.

Daffodils sprout up.

The path

Pine needles carpet the trail through the woods.

No question

which way to go,

simply follow the path.

The world is quiet here, and

the silence absorbs the sounds of my footsteps,

as if I were a ballerina, light as a feather,

my toes barely touching the ground.

My mind is free to wander here,

nothing to distract,

except the rustling of leaves

and the occasional birds

calling out to one another.

The trail circles around and soon

I am back where I started.

Am I any wiser for having walked these few miles?

Is the path to my future any clearer?

In nature

Beauty in nature is a gift  

I ponder every morning,

looking out at my yard,

watching the flowers and birds and rabbits and squirrels

doing what they were created to do,

being what they were created to be.

The rhythms of their days

playing out like a symphony.

How I envy them their ease,

their bending with the wind and

welcoming the rain,

the way hummingbirds are drawn to red and

monarchs to milkweed.

Follow their lead, I tell myself.

Stop resisting the wind and sheltering from the rain.

I breathe in the cool morning air and remember that

I, too, was created with a purpose.

Becoming who I am meant to be

My word for the year is trust, and I have been weaving that word into my prayer and meditation.

I desire to grow in trust, and I have issues with trusting.

It is a conundrum. I want to trust, and I am afraid to trust.

As I considered Lent and where God may be inviting me to grow in trust, this question came to me: Am I limiting God by holding onto what feels safe?

I know that trust involves a great deal of letting go, but this question presented my lack of trust and my fear of letting go in a different way. This question involves how God acts through me.

When my friend Jim had brain cancer, we spent a good deal of time at the New Jersey shore. Jim would look out at the ocean and say, “Look how big our God is.” And then he would add, “Think big thoughts.”

Looking out over the ocean, it is easy to see vastness and openness. It is easy to imagine a God big enough to create not only the ocean but the sky above. It is easy to think big thoughts.

But I don’t live by the ocean, and my outside horizon is limited by houses and trees.

Here, it is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, the sameness of life, the smallness of life. Here it is easy to fall back into old beliefs about my inadequacies and to narrow my worldview.

I have tried to pay attention to when I am limiting my vision, when I am living and acting out of fear instead of trust, when I am living small instead of living large.

And in that awareness, I can see how often I choose to stick with what has been, rather than to risk something new; to cling to old habits and beliefs that feel safe in their familiarity, rather than let go of the old to make room for something new.

My Lenten question reminds me that when I live out of a small place, a place of fear or stinginess, I am not just limiting myself, but limiting how God interacts in my world.

I am continually tempted to play it safe, to stick with what is familiar—and God keeps inviting me to live larger, to step outside of what is known and familiar. God invites me into the great unknown. How scary that can be!

Trust me, God says. I know the plans I have for you (Jeremiah 29:11).

Again and again, I am invited to shed what has held me back and to become who I am meant to be.

Am I limiting God by holding onto what feels safe? The answer is yes. The follow-up question is, what needs to change so I can move from fear to trust?

Are you thinking big thoughts? Living large? Or do your fears hold you back? What keeps you from becoming the person you were created to be?

Patience and faith

The forsythia in my back yard had very few flowers the past three springs. I pruned it every spring since I moved here, hoping it would produce abundant blooms. A friend who knows about such things told me there are some varieties that flower less and suggested I consider getting a different variety. I was about to give up on my forsythia, and then it bloomed.Be patient, Madeline, I heard God saying.

A few weeks later, I was at a retreat center that has a labyrinth. During a workshop break, I visited the labyrinth and started to walk meditatively along the outer circle. At the first turn in the path, I stopped and looked at the stone in the middle. The brochure had said it was a symbol of Jacob meeting God. I pondered that for a bit and then I had an impulse to just walk to the middle, to skip the layers of circles and jump to the center.The words of Teilhard de Chardin came to me.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

 And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

 Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

 Be patient, God again said to me.

Patience is a virtue that I can work on, and it seems God is inviting me to develop this virtue.Faith, on the other hand, is a gift that is about desire and openness.

Taken together, patience and faith invite me to let go of my expectations and my rush-to-the-end attitude. They invite me to accept what is just the way it is, and to move against my tendency to want things to be other than they are.

Patience and faith invite me to lean into God and let God lead me, to accept what is with gratitude and even joy. Opening my hands to receive what God offers, waiting for the gift and holding it loosely enough that I don’t crush it—that is the stance of patience and faith.

Like the forsythia in my yard, I want to surprise the people who have tended to me by trusting God’s grace and becoming the person God intended.