Missing Shalem
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by CeCe Balboni
Last night I signed off on an e-mail note, "Missing Shalem, CeCe." As soon as I pressed send, the questions began. Missing what? Missing whom? Certainly I wasn't missing that set of offices on Grosvenor Lane known as Shalem. I hadn't been to those offices in almost four years since I attended a one-day workshop on spiritual direction. Watching the group direction video recently, I saw the Shalem library and the fountain at the front door. They were familiar, and it felt good to see that much of the Shalem space, but that is not what I was missing. On the video there were faces of people I had gotten to know a bit on retreats- Patricia Gibler Clark and Lynne Smith among others. While fond to remember, this was not what "missing Shalem" meant either.So there I was, longing for something but not able at all to capture it in those words. I went to bed grumbling about how hasty I am in e-mail and how I was probably born in the wrong century because life goes too fast and flings us too far from home.
And I really was missing Shalem. But it gets crazier. My Shalem time was spent reading, writing, and sitting with others around a candle often in silence. The best Shalem time was always spent in silence-a couple of days or so in the first and second residencies and a longer period on the winter retreat. So what's to miss-I have books, articles, candles, prayer and plenty of silence in Atlanta. It is something else that gets labeled "Shalem" that I am missing.
Several friends of mine are considering the Shalem Spiritual Guidance Program. They are wisely seeking what I am missing. These longing friends know at Shalem they will not be trained for anything, only opened more deeply to what they already know and do.
How does the Shalem spiritual direction program open us? Thomas Merton, speaking to the novitiates at Gethsemane, says that solitude and silence prepare us for community. He says our part in prayer is receptivity: What we can do is to create an empty space in our consciousness and put other considerations aside for the time being so that we can be shaped by whatever comes from the heart.
In solitude and silence we go to the Unknown, believing in and hoping for Love. For just a moment or two, we cease striving with our own egos-what we want and crave and think we deserve. We somehow show up empty and willing to receive what is being given. And while there, in a deep listening, beyond our own consideration, we hear that golden chord-the one that seems to sound in every longing heart-and we are united, in compassion and Love, with all the suffering and longing of those before, with and after us. And because God is so generous with our feeble hearts, we don't even know it.
But some days we are surprised by what Thomas Kelly describes as showing up in life vaguely reminiscent as the Son of Man. God's Love, God's transcendent Love, has swollen our hearts. Compassion and courage emerge for some moments. And the world changes, one heart at a time.
I do miss Shalem. It is one of those special places where I am invited into that silence by others seeking what I seek and listening for what I so long to hear.
CeCe is a graduate of Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program, Class of 2001.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.