by Rose Mary Dougherty

The first full day of the winter retreat this year was warm but dreary. The sun was hardly visible throughout the day. But, as we ended our afternoon session, I walked outside to another side of the building to watch the sunset. When I got to the spot where I usually stand, I said to myself, "You silly thing! What are you doing here? Why would you expect to see the sunset when you've hardly seen the sun all day?" Just as I turned to walk away, I heard someone say, as though they had read my mind, "There it is." And there it was: a muted red ball showing through the parting clouds. I stood in silence with others, appreciating what, except for the prompting of another who could see what I couldn't see, I would have missed.

I remembered last year's retreat when sunsets were very vivid and most of us gathered outside in silence, leaning against the same wall, to watch them. I thought about the time a young woman working in housekeeping approached me during that retreat, asking, "Who are these Shalem people and what do they do?" I asked her why she wanted to know. She responded, "They're something! I was leaving work yesterday, dead tired. I couldn't wait 'till I got home. I was hurrying out to get in my car and I saw all these people lined up against the wall in silence, everyone looking in the same direction. I stopped to see what they were looking at. It was beautiful, that sunset! I can't believe I've worked here all these years and have never seen it. I would have missed it then if I hadn't seen those Shalem people looking at it. I want to take time to see it before I go home--as many days as I can."

I thought about those two incidents several times throughout the retreat. They brought to mind a conversation I had had with a Jewish friend not long before. We talked about what keeps us from living contemplatively, from being present to the real, how we often hurry past some people and facets of life because they appear insignificant. They don't have the same glitter as others we encounter. He shared with me some words from the Jerusalem Talmud that translate into something like this: "We are destined to give an account of everything our eyes have beheld and from which we did not partake."

Inherent in these words is the re-affirmation of the Genesis truth that God sees all is good, that at the core of all of life is goodness. They challenge me to expect goodness, to keep my eyes open for it, and partake of it fully. They imply responsibility for seeing what is to be seen, for being contemplative.

Responsibility can often be a heavy burden for me. It can trigger all the "shoulds" and all the striving of which I have ever been capable. But this particular responsibility has not seemed heavy. Rather, there is within it the simple invitation to awareness and the desire to claim my response-ability to life. The awareness will show the authentic response. When I get into figuring out how to figure out appropriate responses, there is the call to trust the guidance of God's spirit in each moment: "Don't worry about tomorrow or what you should say. What you are to say will be given to you" (Luke 12:12).

This idea of being open to God in all of life is not new to me. I have read the Christian contemplatives, like Julian of Norwich and Ignatius of Loyola, who speak of finding God in all things, and Meister Eckhart who writes, "Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things." But it seems as though the process of finding God in all things has been slowly evolving for me. For a long while in my spiritual journey, God and I both seemed content to have me look for God and sometimes even find God mostly in times of intentional prayer. Gradually, however, prayer began to dry up; God was no longer present as I had once known God to be. It seemed, instead, that God was luring me from the cell of privatized intimacy, replacing it with the sanctuary of life where I have begun to find God in and through others who share my desire for God. I also find God more easily in nature. Sometimes even in the midst of the work I am doing, I remember to expect that God is present and I turn to God in prayer.

>But the words of the Jerusalem Talmud: "We are destined to give an account of everything our eyes have beheld and from which we did not partake," suggest to me that God is wanting to take me beyond the sanctuary of the beautiful and "holy" into the theater of the real so that I might find God in what I label as ugly and "unholy," so that I might see through sin, and evil, to the goodness of God.

What if I do not find God in this theater? Is that a possibility? It certainly is. But not because God is not present. If I do not find God there, it may be because I am afraid to look for God there. Or perhaps I have so conditioned myself to finding God only in the beautiful and holy that I have blinded myself to other possibilities. If I sense that I am pre-conditioned for what I might find, perhaps I can ask that God remove the film of my conditioning, clarifying my vision to see what is. Perhaps when I really look at what I judged as "unholy" I will be given to see my own misperceptions. Or perhaps I will stand with God, weeping in the face of evil, longing to unleash the essential goodness hidden in its camouflage.

Julian of Norwich says that when she saw the suffering Christ who had forgiven her she could see for the first time the good in all, see God in all. Perhaps even in the face of my own sin I will see my own good and thus be free to see the good of all.

In the the end, though, it doesn't matter whether we find ourselves in the cell of personal intimacy, the sanctuary of the holy, or the theater of the real. Wherever we find ourselves we are meant to participate fully in the life that is offered us. As Jean-Pierre de Caussade reminds us, "(Our lives flow) unceasingly in that unknown deep where all that is necessary is to love and accept the present moment as the best, with perfect trust in God's universal goodness."