Volume 29, No. 3-Fall, 2005
Table of Contents
Keeping Grounded
by Margaret Benefiel
Flying
by Martha Campbell
The Yearning
by Carole Crumley
"Is There Any Hope For the World?"
by Tilden Edwards
Here: The Champion of Nothing
by David Rensberger
Living on Empty
by Gigi Ross
Reflections from Shalem's West Coast Regional Gathering
by Barbara Troxell & Donna Pritchard
A Stream of Spiritual History
Intro
A few words about Jerry May's last article for Shalem News "A Stream of Spiritual History"
In February 1986, Jerry wrote his original "A Stream of Spiritual History" article and in May 1986 followed with "Important Historical Influences for Shalem, Part II," which gave a brief description of the historical figures to accompany the previous graphic "stream." Because many people had asked for an update, Jerry created this new version, which revises and combines both original articles.
Download the PDF
A Stream of Spiritual History (pdf)
Keeping Grounded
by Margaret Benefiel
From the beginning, Shalem has sought to integrate its contemplative approach to spirituality not only into its program offerings but also into its life as an organization.
The structures and processes put into place during Shalem's early years have changed and grown as Shalem has grown. Shalem, as an organization, has always attempted to allow the Spirit to guide organizational life. Aware that institutions can become self-perpetuating even when the life has gone out of them, Shalem leaders have sought to ensure that the institutional structures continue to serve the mission, rather than the other way around. Although they have often found this goal difficult to attain, they continue to struggle toward it. As Tilden Edwards, Shalem's former Executive Director, reflected, upon his retirement after 27 years in the position: [The role of Executive Director] has taught me empathy for executives in other organizations, as I have traversed the spiritual and managerial pitfalls, mistakes, and never-ending decisions about programs, policies, staffing, and crises over the years. I have tried, not always successfully, to trust the Spirit's aliveness in our evolving organizational life: in its dilemmas and actions, joys and pains, surprises and predictabilities. The job has been a fierce teacher of humility, listening discerningly, learning when to act and when to wait, and the necessity of self-examination and courage related to the kinds of personal presence called for amidst many organizational interactions.
Shalem staff seek to bring a prayerful, attentive presence to staff meetings. As they have experimented with various ways of doing this, they have discovered, among other things, that if a meeting goes for more than twenty minutes without a break for silence, they can be quite certain that ego has taken over.
In reflecting on Shalem's commitment to a prayerful presence in meetings, current co-executive director Carole Crumley relates how the practice of passing a stone around the group and asking the one who holds it to be in silent prayer, affected her: Inevitably I would have a stake in some item on the agenda and usually I would get the prayer stone at the moment we came to that item. I discovered that just being in prayer for that item was an enormous contribution.
Bill Dietrich, the other current co-executive director, also experiences the power of prayerful attentiveness in meetings. At the same time, he acknowledges the difficulty of consistently practicing it. For example, When people start talking about money it's amazing how prayerfulness can just go right out the window. I can recall times when we just went headlong into our conversation for an hour and got finished with the meeting and said, "Oops."
When...Tilden retired...the transition to the new executive director had been prepared for by more than a year of prayer and discernment. Visitors to Shalem's website were invited to pray for the process of selecting a new executive director, and the search committee did its work with an attitude of prayerful discernment. Applicants for the position were asked to write about their sense of call and the place of prayerfulness in leadership, as well as about specific skills they had for the job. The interview process for finalists included prayer with the search committee and questions about how the candidate would nurture spirituality in Shalem's organizational life.
When the new executive director stayed less than two years, the temptation for Shalem staff and board was to ask, "Why did God let us down?" or "What did we do wrong?" Instead, because of their years of deep attentiveness and prayer together, despite the bumps and challenges, Shalem folks were able to remember that the discernment process is not a template that guarantees certain results. They were able to turn to God again and ask, "What is God doing here?" While the process of filling the interim position and eventually the permanent position wasn't always easy, staff and board members were reminded that God continued to walk with them.
At Shalem, we see how the faithful and consistent spiritual grounding of the organization ... opens possibilities for creative solutions and resolutions that would otherwise be invisible. One of the fruits of spiritual grounding is the patience to listen for unexpected solutions, leading to answers which are out of the box.
Non-profits nearly always begin as labors of love, addressing needs in the world which their founders are called to address. On the surface, these needs might seem to be the soul of the organization, its driving impetus. While this is partially true, the life of the organization proceeds from its members' callings and needs as well, and these are served by the organization as surely as the "bottom line" of the needs it addresses. [These] organizations are as much about the community they create as they are about the communities they serve. It is this chemistry that allows them to thrive, adapt, and survive the inevitable changes thrust upon them.
This article is excerpted from Margaret's new book, Soul at Work: Spiritual Leadership in Organizations (Seabury Books, 2005). For information on Margaret's travel schedule or to order her book, visit www.executivesoul.com
Flying
by Martha Campbell
And Jesus said, "Look at the birds...
learn a lesson..." -Matthew 6
A friend recently told me a story of something that happened to him this past June when he had driven north to the family summer home in Maine for a few days of R and R. The house, situated on an inland lake, was built some 20 years ago and he described it as spacious, airy, and filled with light, plants and immense windows. Often in the summer, the family members leave all the doors open, and my friend returned from a walk on the beach one day to find a hummingbird trapped in the living room, beating vainly on a glass pane trying to escape. Jim gently approached the frightened bird and removed it from the window in his cupped hands. He walked slowly and carefully to the porch, where he sat gently in a chair, and opened his hands. The bird rested there paralyzed and shivering, for five minutes. It must have been exhausted. Then it began to move slightly and with a sudden burst of energy, off it flew.
The image of that caught little bird has come to me more than once as an analogy of the human tendency to willfully and stubbornly find one's way through difficult situations. Focused on "one way through," there is a tendency to become exhausted with effort to make work this seemingly apparent but totally impossible solution to the dilemma. Slowly, in the face of such insurmountable obstacles, human limitation and powerlessness wakes us up to a new reality. Situations such as this, far from being failure, are really the means to freedom. We open to the truth and to the gift of simply being in the present moment which in a mysterious way becomes the "gentle hand" that lifts our wounded and stunned consciousness into the very freedom we had been seeking.
Exhaustion and weariness, the result of endless effort, have the potential to bring us to the present moment. Dwelling in the present moment, we allow an awareness of the reality of "what is" to take hold. This awareness invites us to open to the Divine Presence even in the midst of -perhaps even because of-such humbling circumstances. We learn the freedom of surrender. In that very moment of surrender, like the little bird, the poverty of a stunned awareness and the openness of the present moment lift us into the reality of freedom.
Walter Burghardt, SJ describes contemplation as "a long, loving look at the real." Even resistance is material for contemplative awareness, and embracing resistance has the capacity to open us to another possibility, even in the struggle. In openness to receiving "what is," it becomes possible to experience the struggle in a non-attached way and to accept the present moment as the gift that it truly is. Now "looking at the real" yields to welcoming it as well, just as it is. No struggle. No blame. Accepting the gift of struggle in the present moment, and resting in an attitude of non-attached openness, awakens one to the comforting hands of a Presence that restores calmness and equilibrium. There strength is gathered and an ability to move on results. This life-giving process is repeated over and over again through endlessly creative life scenarios.
Stunned, frightened, exhausted, it takes time to recognize the possibility of expansiveness and to adjust to the spacious freedom that is already given. It is in this seeming state of failure that break-through to the present graced moment becomes possible. Like that stunned little bird, the possibility of freedom lies in letting go, allowing the present moment to caress and calm. Beyond the struggle there is the possibility of new life awaiting those who are willing to begin again. With a sudden burst of energy, we learn to fly.
The Yearning
by Carole Crumley
My husband and I escaped for a week's vacation this summer to a small North Carolina beach. We have been going there off and on for many years, but this time I noticed something different in that vacation landscape, something I couldn't name at first.
One evening as we walked on the beach, I saw an older couple doing T'ai Chi together. When they had finished the "form," they sat in their sand chairs and silently watched the sunset. The next morning, as we looked for shells at dawn, a young couple raced out onto the beach and began doing yoga poses. They greeted the sun as it rose over the ocean, reaching first to the heavens, then bending forward touching the sand around their toes in long, silent, graceful stretches.
Later on, we went to the island post office to mail our postcards home. Tucked away in a corner were some used books for sale, discarded beach reading at cheap prices. The books were organized by size: large books, one dollar; medium sized ones, fifty cents; thin ones, a nickel. I was eagerly searching for some good mysteries when my husband exclaimed, "Look at this!" He pulled a slim volume out of the stack and handed me Nicholas of Cusa's Vision of God, with an introduction by Evelyn Underhill. This fifteenth-century classic was mine for five cents. A torn slip of paper inside carried a thoughtful hand-written warning: "difficult to understand." But someone had clearly tried, underlining passages in every chapter.
This particular stretch of beach is also home to the endangered Loggerhead and Green sea turtles. The turtles return there every year to lay their nests and have been doing so for centuries, perhaps millennia. In the dark of night, the mother turtle digs a hole in the sand at least two feet deep and lays 100-150 eggs! She covers them with sand and returns to the ocean while her eggs incubate for 50-70 days, depending on how warm it is. The eggs also hatch at night, and when the time is close, local residents keep vigil.
We joined them one night, babysitting the nest, waiting like any eager parent for a new birth. Our waiting room was filled with miles of sand, ocean breezes, waves lapping at the shore and a dazzling night sky. The baby turtles didn't hatch while we were there, but those who watched shared other stories of witnessing this miracle of nature. They spoke of their sense of Mystery, their close-ness to God and to all of creation that came from this experience.
Each day I soaked up the beauty of the place, filling the eyes of my soul with nature's glory. Yet while we were there, another side of nature was being revealed through hurricane Katrina. Helpless to know what to do from such a distance, we held our fellow citizens before God in prayer and offered our financial contribution to the many others that were flowing from hearts of compassion.
The night before we left, we attended the local community theater's production of Nunsense. Before the play began, the folks seated behind us talked at length about a community they had heard about, men and women in some distant place who are hermits. They wondered if a person could make a silent retreat there. "Oh yes," one of them answered, "but the waiting list is long."
Upon my return to the office, the final reflection paper from a recent graduate of Shalem's Clergy Spiritual Life and Leadership: Going Deeper program was waiting for me. She wrote that her time in the program had been one of a deepening yearning for God. She said she came to the program with that yearning in her heart but with no words for it.
I thought immediately about our time at the beach. Was this what I was sensing in these vacation vignettes, something of this same yearning, a yearning to draw closer to God? A yearning that finds expression in multiple ways?
We reach out to mystics of previous generations who can show us the way, even if their writings are "difficult to understand." We stretch for the "moreness" of God even as we touch into the fullness of God already present in this situation. We sign up for retreats, willing to wait if the list is long. We join others in contemplative programs and prayer groups who share this longing for God and find our own yearning amplified and deepened. We turn to God in the beauty of nature and marvel at the wildness of God's creation. We reach out to others in compassion, yearning to offer what we can to those in need.
This yearning, the poet Rumi says, draws you toward union. It is the connection. "This longing you express is the return message,"* that is, it is both our prayer and God's prayer in us, our prayer and God's response.
The clergy program participant wrote that finally she realized her yearning was God-given. "Holy One, draw me close to you in love," she prayed. And the God of our yearning hearts answers and keeps us close by deepening our longing.
* From "Love Dogs" in The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne.
"Is There Any Hope For the World?"
by Tilden Edwards
I'm standing with my wife, Mary, in a silent, single-file line of 100 people, with a candle in one hand, and a placard in the other that supports a search for peace, in downtown Lewes, Delaware, near where we have been vacationing. It's Wednesday evening, August 17th. This is one of over 1,600 vigils across the country tonight, marking the sacrifice of fallen soldiers and civilians in Iraq and their families, and our yearning for peace.
Standing at one end of the line is Patricia Gibler (Clark), who was a Shalem staff member for many years before moving to this small town. She organized this special vigil, which extends the weekly one she has led every Sunday for the past year. She walks down the silent line sometimes, softly encouraging people to remember various people involved in the war: the moms, the children, the soldiers, etc.
The weekly vigil grew out of Patricia's over-arching concern not for advocating a particular position but for "holding the space" in which people can find common ground, common openness to the tough questions about how we can more sanely live together in this world, through and beyond this war. I would call the vigil true contemplative grounding for such concern. I am being given silent space in community to let everything show itself just as it is, inside and around me, and to let myself be receptive to wht may be given. As my questions and judgments rise, they are caught up in a larger sense of God's mysterious grace somehow threading through what is happening and subtly working in me, in us, drawing us toward how we are to be together in this world and what we are to do. The vigil sensitizes me to that larger movement of Spirit, lightening my temptation to seize the time with some unripe action that has not steeped in that larger gracious Presence, and at the same time heightening my attentiveness to what really is called for.
So much more goes through my heart-mind as I stand here on the street. I feel the glass and steel walls of the passing cars, keeping the passengers distant. I feel vulnerable, pleading in my heart for their openness to what makes for a true and inclusive peace, or at least for their caring about all the people dying, wounded and mentally scarred in this war (as in all wars, and all natural disasters).
Sometimes I feel myself judging those who seem to pass with indifference or fear and those who stand across the street heckling us. Sometimes my heart deepens to include them in my prayer, with a sense of mutual belonging. Jesus' agonized words before the gates of Jerusalem on the way to his passion come to mind: "If you had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes." I also remember Jesus' revolutionary capacity to forgive those who would kill his calling of us to a less fearful and power crazed self, his calling to the compassionate and free true self and community in God that is ours in exchange for opening our lives to the divine Beloved.
I suddenly remember a stark question put to me privately by a pastor in a Shalem extension program last week: "Is there any hope for the world?" This was a heartfelt question of a contemplative church minister deeply longing for God's shalom in a world full of mutual violence, willfulness, misunderstanding, and delusion. I include him in my prayer, along with so many other prayers floating to the surface. I, too, long for God's elusive kin-dom.
That longing, I think, is God's longing alive in me, in us. It's the foundation of our hope for the world. In that longing we're given prayers for the world, vigils to organize or join that bring us together at the deepest level of yearning, and other actions to offer for the world's wellbeing.
Most of them are small acts of courage and caring. But they are not worthless. Just as an atom's shifted motion can affect atoms in distant galaxies, so does each one of our little spirit-acts mysteriously affect the world's heartbeat. We are free vessels of one pervasive Spirit that would shape love and beauty through our every movement. In that spacious-intimate Holy Spirit, we find our true home and our eternal hope, amidst the twisted powers and principalities of this world.
Patricia welcomes anyone to join the Sunday vigils, 1:00-1:45 pm; they take place beside the Zwaanendael Museum on Savannah Road in Lewes, Delaware. Contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Here: The Champion of Nothing
by David Rensberger
In memory of Jerry May:
Here, beneath the pine and beech and poplar,
beside the creek, broad and conversational and brown,
where the sand still holds last night's rain
and the footprints of this morning's man and dog-
downstream now, a brown lab splashing in and fetching-
precisely here, where the ripples rush unhurried
and never change their constant alteration, while the bugs
yammer and the cardinals chip in the wet, just-moving air:
this is where I want to meet you, part of all that's yours
(the part that talks too much and cannot end a sentence),
of all that would not be the thing it is if you were not you.
Infinity is best encountered local, eternity one moment
at a time. The prize is won by sitting still and
seeing, hearing, smelling.
The champion at nothing takes in everything at once.
Living on Empty
by Gigi Ross
Maybe God is longing to live a full life through you.
The week before Palm Sunday felt like Good Friday to me. Anger nailed me to hurt. I was in the throes of what I call a "snit fit" with God. I was angry at God for the usual reason. I didn't like the way my life was turning out, and it was God's fault that I was miserable and had nothing to show for all these gifts and talents I supposedly had. As the week wore on, the anger gentled into frustration, pointing out the desire and longing within me.
At the back of my mind was a presentation on prayer and surrender that I had given earlier for Shalem's Personal Spiritual Deepening Program. I talked about how "thy will be done" is so hard to pray, yet praying it can put us in touch with who we are in God, the One in whom we live and move and have our being. Even though I didn't want to pray this prayer, I felt I had to live what I talked about. I scheduled a solitary retreat day for the spring equinox which coincided with Palm Sunday this year.
I try to come to my retreat days with the same intention I came to a ten-day silent centering prayer retreat I took last September: to trust God would be in the prayer, silence, simplicity, and solitude. Although I took some books to the monastery that fall, I read very little. Aside from the centering prayer sits and the daily office times in the chapel, most of what I did was just sit and look and let my thoughts meander where they would.
So, for my Palm Sunday/spring equinox retreat, I didn't read a lot but spent several hours praying my way through a five-page transcript of a speech on desire. When I came to a passage that spoke to me, I looked up from my reading, stared out the window, and when I thought I had stared long enough, I stared some more, letting my thoughts wander at will. At one point, I was led to ask myself, "What do I want?" Deep down at the core of my being, what did I want? By this time of day I had interrupted my slow reading to wash dishes dirtied from lunch. I repeatedly asked myself that question, listening to answers that seemed to emerge from ever deeper places within me. Finally, I heard an answer that felt right: what I most wanted was to feel one with God. Not just know intellectually that God and I are one but to experience that oneness. Always.
Shortly after returning to the article, I was led to the question, "What does God want?" Almost immediately, I got an internal glimpse of the anger and frustration I was feeling being God's anger and frustration. Then these words came to me:
Maybe God, too, is dissatisfied.
Maybe God is longing to live a full life through you.
You're in this together.
I relate the above story not to dissect the message I received on my retreat. I agree with John of the Cross that whatever needed to be communicated was done in the moment. I continue to pray and reflect on the words, but not to discover a one true meaning; I see my prayer and reflection as a way of living into the meaning, a way of trusting that my true self-that is, myself made in God's image, always in prayer, and always one with God-understands and is cooperating with God's will, however occluded my conscious understanding may be. I write this story to celebrate how retreat time alone with an open agenda renews my prayer, prayer being a shorthand word for relationship with God.
Six weeks later I scheduled another solitary retreat day; this one fell on May Day. The next day I walked into the kitchen at work and noticed a calendar exhorting me to find the sacredness in each moment. Good advice, no doubt, but in my experience the sacredness in the moment is more likely to reveal itself to me in God's own time when I least expect to see it than I am to find it. The paragraph following the exhortation continued in the same vein; I felt I was being given a task to add to a spiritual to-do list.
Flipping through the calendar, I noticed each day suggested something I needed to do. Curiosity got the better of me so I looked to see what the calendar was called. Running on Plenty at Work: A Year of Renewal Strategies. Remembering my experience of the previous day, I laughed out loud. So, I guess more than anything, I want to celebrate living on empty at work, at home, everywhere.
This is not a critique of the calendar. Others at work seem to get something out of it and there was a time when I was more "task-oriented" about my spirituality. But now I seem to be led to live in the realization that my relationship with God is not a task, not something I do or even work at.
I cherish my solitary retreat days because they point to the possibility of living in a rhythm that arises out of and falls back into prayer. The fullness of those days was borne out of emptying myself of all except my desire to be aware of my relationship with God. And, for a while at least, this awareness of my desire grounds all that I do at Shalem and elsewhere.
Reflections from Shalem's West Coast Regional Gathering
by Barbara Troxell & Donna Pritchard
January 24-28, 2005
Mercy Center, Burlingame, CA
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Barbara Troxell's Reflection:
What a gift for me! I entered the Shalem West Coast Gathering inwardly raising the question, "What is my next call, beyond continuity of what is already present for me, in this active retirement time?" I came rather fragmented within, yet eagerly and expectantly. I returned home, driving more gently down the 400 mile stretch to southern California, ready to face a necessary surgical procedure and open to making changes towards a more contemplative way of being.
Throughout the five days, I was recalled again and again to being attentive to what is, moment by moment, and to letting go to God, knowing that I am held in love and will be guided as needed. Gifted moments and luminous aspects graced the Gathering for me. Here are some of them:
The great resonant temple bell called us into silence and out of silence, as staff spoke of "inviting the bell," rather than "ringing" or "striking" the bell. We were invited to liminal spaces as the bell was invited. Staff presented their reflections and engaged ours on contemplative grounding for life and leadership.
Tilden Edwards' evocative presentations led us into contemplative awareness, first within ourselves, then in stimulating sharing in small groups, and always with open sensitivity to the wider society and world.
My small group-participants from Jewish and Christian communities of faith, all living in southern California-was a remarkable opportunity. People I had never met before developed together into a circle of trust, care and prayer.
The silent retreat opened my own depths in a fresh and fruitful way. Especially during this time, the chanting, poetry, slow walking, and sounds and sights led me to deeper silence and prayerful knowing. One song with movement (adapted from a poem by Wendell Berry) has remained with me, almost as a mantra: "When I rise up, let me rise up, like a bird, gracefully. And when I fall, let me fall down, like a leaf, gratefully, without regret."
Insights and invitations from the Gathering were many. I came to know again that regular contemplative practice including silence, walking, chanting-often in solitude, sometimes in groups-is essential for me. I want to live more readily in the moment and to sense the wonder and delight, the suffering and pathos, the humor and quirkiness of life more vividly. I want to let my actions for peace and justice, as well as my teaching and leading.
There is much more that has emerged and grown for me from the Regional Gathering. But perhaps it is enough to say I was recalled to what is most needful: attentiveness to the Holy in all things, in all time, in all places. For the wonderful staff, the participants who interacted in a great circle of trust, and for fresh awareness of God's love in all that is, I say, thanks be to God!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Donna Pritchard's Reflection:
"Homecoming"-that was the word going through my mind during Shalem's West Coast Gathering. I had never actually been to the Mercy Center, had never met most of the participants and had never been introduced to the majority of the leaders. I also had to drive three hours to take a two-hour flight, then catch a taxi to the center. Still, I felt like I was "coming home" all week.
In some very real ways, every Shalem experience enables us to come home-to our truest selves, that part of our souls which knows and appreciates the presence of God in every moment. Gerald May, in The Awakened Heart speaks about the spiritual life as a "series of homecomings"-coming home to the present moment, coming home to the desire for love and ultimately, coming home to God.
In this understanding, living the spiritual life means risking the honest experience of home-sickness, feeling its pain and allowing that to nudge us back into awareness of God. Again, in May's words, "Each noticing [of God's presence] points us homeward.... God, who is our true home, knows right where we are."
The power of gathering with fellow pilgrims who are trying to find the way home cannot be underestimated. There is a beautiful synergy created in silence that is heavy with homesickness and tinged with hope. In our Gathering we glimpsed the truth of homecoming that Mary Oliver paints in her poem,
"Wild Geese":
"You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves."
Thank you, my brothers and sisters, who remind me to "let the soft animal of my body"-and even at times the hardness of my heart-"love what it loves," on the way toward home.