From Bereft to Befriended

Are you awake to the grief in our midst that is begging for spiritual companionship? November is often referred to as a “thin time” and “thin place.” As we experience All Saints Day, All Souls Day, and El Dia de los Muertos, many believe our ancestors are particularly near; the veil between heaven and earth is thin. With the wisdom of the saints closely at hand, what beckons soul tending in your neighborhood? How might our spiritual ancestors lend us courage to be present to suffering?

On All Saints Day, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I stood in awe on the edge of two abysses of grief in New York. One abyss is the 9/11 World Trade Center Memorial: a living reminder of the past. The other abyss is the encampment of the Occupy Wall Street movement: a living reminder of present injustice. Both experiences engaged me with the pain of bereavement and the unexpected way that grief leads to openness for spiritual friendship.

9/11 World Trade Center Memorial

Like a giant coffin within a coffin, the 9/11 Memorial consists of two reflective pools cut deep into the earth in the same place the towers once stood. Thin streams of water fall down the interior walls of the giant upper coffin, draining into a lower coffin where the waterfall descends into a chasm. Nearly 3,000 names of the men, women, and children killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001 and February 26, 1993 are inscribed in bronze on parapets surrounding the twin memorial pools. The black walls of names keep visitors from being physically swept into the deep hole. However, the fluid sounds, the movement of rushing water, and the gentle mist rising amid the names invite visitors to be emotionally swept into the abyss of grief and mystery that Robert Frost writes about in his poem, “Bereft”:

Where had I heard this wind before

Change like this to a deeper roar?

… I was in my life alone,

Word I had no one left but God.

As I touched the names of people, my tears joined tears of thousands who have come to experience the deep roar of the 9/11 Memorial. Yet, a surprising peace came when I photographed three chairs to offer you a picture of my experience of God’s presence amid the dark side of humanity. Many people approached me wanting to learn more about the three chairs. As I explained the role of a sacred presence in the third chair, people talked about their spiritual understanding of the memorial. The memorial creates a place for befriending strangers and facilitates sharing stories of grief. Certainly this is what bereavement groups offer. There at the 9/11 Memorial, God’s healing presence was palpable.

Occupy Wall Street

After visiting the 9/11 Memorial, I spent a couple of hours listening to the concerns of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Anguishing stories of job loss, anxiety about the environment, and worry about the lack of basic health care emerged. I witnessed grief in its raw, messy form, as people gave voice to their disgust and distrust in global systems that are not caring for our most vulnerable beings.

Listening to the protesters, especially the father of the young girl pictured here, made me appreciate anew the gift of being a spiritual director. On God’s behalf, we are called to listen to the grief-stricken and patiently wait for the mysteriously healing work of befriending strangers in grief. We are not alone in our search for justice and peace. We are not alone in seeking truth. We are not alone in our grief.

For those who have eyes to see, a spiritual hub of contemplative presence exists in Zuccotti Park. Next to the drummers, who rhythmically energize the peaceful-yet-chaotic protest scene, blankets on benches and a “chill out” chair encircle a tree. A simple altar with prayer and meditation beads, stones, and images from many spiritual traditions leans up against the tree trunk. People from many spiritual traditions and none sit in silence, around the tree that provides a place for reflection. I joined the contemplative circle to offer spiritual support with you, dear members, on behalf of people in grief everywhere. With deep gratitude, I bow to you for your spiritual care of our planet during these tumultuous times. Thank you.

Reflection:

How has grief led you to new ways of understanding spiritual presence in our evolving world? Who are the saintly strangers you’ve befriended lately? 

My Ofrenda

Reflections on Dia de los Muertos

In all houses of worship, there is a sacred space. Illuminated by candles or adored with fine cloth, there is a space observed as holy.

Today, Latino communities around the world celebrating Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, will spend time carefully creating a sacred space to honor and celebrate their ancestors and deceased family members. These ofrendas, or offerings, typically include a photo of the departed family member, marigolds, candles, sugar skulls, and items previously belonging to the deceased. Special foods including pan de muerto, or bread of the dead, is placed on the altar to nourish the ancestors. Vibrant colors, the scent of flowers, and freshly baked pan de muerto give these ofrendas honoring the dead an incredible sense of life.

The creation of ofrendas expresses reverence and gratitude towards the ancestors. And similar to the spiritual center in a house of worship, they can also serve as a place for deep grounding.

Last year at this time, I had just spent the month of October searching for an apartment in France. For four weeks, I had traveled between work and the homes of friends, wheeling all my essentials in a carry-on suitcase wherever I went. Finally, on October 31, I moved into a place of my own, and the first piece of furniture I set up was a small pine bed stand. I laid a yellow cloth over the wood, and placed a candle in the center. This was the beginning of my ofrenda, my altar, my sacred space.

With the celebration of Dia de los Muertos, we are encouraged to remember and honor our ancestors, and as with all spiritual holidays, beckoned to take a break from our daily routine to rediscover that which is holy.

This year, SDI welcomes you to join in this contemplative practice and create a sacred space in your home or office to celebrate those who have departed. Take your time and recall those who have gone before to make a place for you in this world. It doesn’t have to be elaborate; it can be as simple as a pine-wood bed stand with a yellow cloth and a single, flickering candle. 

“I hope to persuade you,” began Steven Pinker, “that there is a persistent decline in violence throughout history.” Speaking Monday night at Seattle’s Town Hall on his latest book, Better Angels of Our Nature, author and Harvard professor Stephen Pinker sought to convince the audience that humans everywhere are moving toward peace.

Pinker’s thesis emerges at a remarkable moment in our history: With the growing abundance of around-the-clock information-sharing, new eruptions of violence seem to occur daily. Increased news coverage of terrorism, crime, and war create the impression that our human family will never live in peace. For contemplatives worldwide, however, Pinker’s argument for peace couldn’t have come at a better time: Today marks twenty-five years since spiritual leaders from around the world gathered to pray for peace in Assisi, Italy. It was the first time in human history that such a gathering took place.

The decline in violence, outlined Pinker, may also be accompanied by an increase in our human ability to empathize. This rise in compassion towards others could be the result of a phenomenon he called the “widening-circle” of empathy. First theorized by philosopher Peter Singer, the idea recognizes that we have grown to empathize with more people and beings. Pinker remarked: “Over the millennia, people’s moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races, and even animals.” The circle is ever-widening.

If we take this idea and integrate it with our lives, we realize that our capacity for compassion is continually growing, perhaps even beyond that of our ancestors. Together, we are closer to peace than ever before.

On this historic day celebrating twenty-five years since the first Assisi World Day of Prayer for Peace, imagine yourself as a “widening-circle” of empathy, a growing well of compassion. Where do you notice peace spilling over into new places of your life? In what direction is your circle of compassion expanding?

Hope for the Vulnerable

October 27 is just around the corner, and Spiritual Directors International is eager to celebrate twenty-five years since the first Assisi World Day of Prayer for Peace. On October 27, 1986, spiritual leaders from around the world met in Assisi, Italy, to pray for peace. It was the first time in human history that such a gathering took place.

As we draw nearer to this historic date, ten-word prayers for peace are pouring in from around the world. We’ve received prayers from Afghanistan, Australia, India, and Ireland; from New Zealand, Nigeria, and South Africa. We’ve received prayers for hope, for an end to violence, and for the awakening of truth.

Suzanne Johnson of British Columbia, Canada, prays:

“May the presence of peace provide hope for the vulnerable.”

Often, peace is understood as a meditative state or simply the absence of conflict. Johnson’s prayer, however, taps into the creative possibility of peace kindling hope for those who most need it.

Since the financial crisis of 2009, many around the world have lost their homes, jobs, or sense of security. And as a result, many individuals are finding themselves, for the first time, vulnerable. While governments work to create jobs and keep economies running, people are seeking a new source of hope in their lives. This is evident in the many “Occupy Wall Street” protests occurring around the world. From New York to Cape Town, people are calling out for hope.

As we near the anniversary of the first Assisi World Day of Prayer for Peace, let us be conscious of the world we are living in and its pleas for a peace that does justice. Join us on October 25 at Rolling Ridge Retreat Center, USA, or in your home communities, as we gather to pray: “May the presence of peace provide hope for the vulnerable.”

To create a community gathering for peace, use the SDI Moving toward Peace Community Gathering guide. This resource is meant to serve as an outline, so feel free to add your favorite peace songs, poems, and rituals to your community gathering for peace.

Walking Trees

Celebrating images of the garden and the journey

“We are walking trees,” announced Susan S. Phillips, PhD, while speaking at a gathering of spiritual directors in Mount Angel, Oregon, USA, this past weekend. The Northwest Spiritual Directors Fall Conference 2011 was sponsored by Sacred Path Ministry, and SDI was there to participate and bring you a glimpse of the weekend.

According to Phillips, the journey and the garden are the most prevailing images used in Judeo-Christian scripture to describe the relationship between the holy and ourselves. Just think: the metaphors found throughout the Bible and the Talmud include a tree of wisdom, vines, branches, and a mustard seed. And when we’re not in the garden, we are on a journey, walking like the Israelites toward a land flowing of milk and honey. “Blessed,” reported Phillips, “is a cognate in Hebrew for a word that means ‘on the right path.’” What is holy is inseparable from the image of the journey.

Phillips’s lectures were the cornerstone of the two-day conference. Her scholarly insights on intuition, imagination, the Sabbath, and metaphor provided depth and perspective to the practice of spiritual direction. On the final day of the conference, participants were invited by Phillips to engage with metaphor and draw themselves as walking trees. The results were a collage of color featuring both the garden and the journey, from giant Douglas firs spilling off the page to grandfather oaks spreading acorns across the forest floor.

Reflection: How are the images of the garden and the journey present in your life today? Go ahead, take ten minutes to find your colored pencils and paper, and draw the walking tree that you are in this season of your life. Together let’s discover the orchard of SDI!

Participants Michael Kennedy, Ann Raymond, and Debbie Kohler share the trees that represent themselves.

We are a garden of walking trees!

Peace that surpasses understanding

Did you know that twenty-five years ago, Assisi, Italy became the peace capital of the world? Pope John Paul II (2R) organized the first World Day of Prayer for Peace on October 27, 1986. Spiritual leaders from around the global gathered to pray for peace including African healers, the Dalai Lama (R), Rabbi Elio Toaff, Archbishop of Canterbury Robert A. K. Runcie (L), Muslim imams, Native American medicine men, the Archbishop of Thyateira and Great Britain Methodios (2L), Shintoists, Sikhs,  Zoroastrians, and others (see photograph above taken in Assisi).

“For the first time in history, we have come together from everywhere, Christian Churches and Ecclesial Communities, and World Religions, in this sacred place dedicated to Saint Francis, to witness before the world, each according to his own conviction, about the transcendent quality of peace.” – Pope John Paul II

To commemorate that historic gathering for peace, Pope Benedict will make a pilgrimage to Assisi on October 27 with spiritual leaders from around the world. The theme for this year’s gathering is “Pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace.”

Participate in peace

As a way of participating prayerfully in the 2011 Assisi peace gathering, the Coordinating Council of Spiritual Directors International will gather near Boston for an evening of contemplative practice: Cultivating Compassion: Moving toward Peace. Please join us in Boston on October 25, or consider creating a similar interfaith gathering for peace in your home communities the week of October 27.

Another way to participate in Cultivating Compassion: Moving toward Peace is to send us your prayer for peace. By October 5, send us (office@sdiworld.org) a prayer of ten words or less for peace, along with a picture of you, your name, your state, province, territory, and your country. We will include your prayer for peace in a slideshow that will be shared on October 25 and online.

Pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace

The theme of this year’s Assisi gathering, “Pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace,” highlights the spiritual journey we each take toward truth and peace. By learning about truth in spiritual traditions around the world, we become better stewards of our human, spiritual heritage. We become pilgrims of truth.

Meeting regularly with a spiritual companion helps us to seek truth, to become peaceful within, and to become courageous peace makers in our communities. In spiritual direction, we listen with a discerning heart and learn contemplative practices that still the busy mind. Over time, our hearts and minds learn to discern truth and to trust peace.

Ultimate Reality is being peace. Spiritual direction helps us participate fully in Ultimate Reality. God calls us to be people of peace. Meeting regularly with a spiritual companion fosters our unique response to God’s call to be people of peace. Together, may we walk life’s pilgrimage toward a peace that surpasses understanding. From whatever spiritual tradition we come, may we join in our contemplative practice with our Jewish brothers and sisters during the Yom Kippur High Holy Days and join the world in praying for peace on October 27. 

Reflection:

How does meeting regularly with a spiritual director move you toward peace? What contemplative practices help you respond to God’s call to be people of peace?

Moving toward Peace

Notice Saint Francis dancing with birds. He’s not pensively looking down into a birdbath with a dove on his shoulder and squirrels at his feet like we see so often in garden art. No, the sculptor depicts Saint Francis actively engaged with the birds, lost and found in their flock, moving with them in the direction of God. 

This special sculpture in the courtyard of the Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria in Bethlehem shows Saint Francis grounded and flying at the same time. As he moves toward peace within, he can’t help but become one with all of God’s creation.

What a beautiful image to depict what happens in spiritual direction. What a powerful image to contemplate as we approach a significant anniversary and a global holiday during September.

Saint Francis and Islam

Did you know that Saint Francis intentionally learned about the Islamic tradition and made efforts to be in conversation with Muslims? During a recent planning meeting for an upcoming Spiritual Directors International pilgrimage to Assisi, Franciscan Brother David Liedl talked about how Francis was an engaged contemplative who reached out for understanding across traditions. If you would like to learn more, David recommended a book by J. Hoeberichts titled Francis and Islam.

Contemplative Practice for Peace

As we reflect on the tenth anniversary of September 11 and celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the United Nations Day of Peace on September 21, how might we personally and in our communities welcome the “Other”? Like Saint Francis, how might we seek out people from other traditions to become people of peace? Not a sappy birdbath peace, but the kind of peace that responds to the call to be grounded and uplifted at the same time. Rooted in our spiritual traditions and so trusting of God’s guidance that we are swept up into a movement toward peace and understanding that makes us one with all of creation.

Moving toward Peace

Looking ahead to October, there’s another important anniversary for peace across spiritual traditions: October 27. Twenty five years ago, the late Pope John Paul II invited Jewish leaders, the Dalai Lama, Imams, and dozens of other spiritual leaders from around the world and across traditions to join him in Assisi – the home of Saint Francis – to pray for an end to violence and suffering perpetrated in the name of religion.

To commemorate that historic gathering for peace, Pope Benedict will be in Assisi on October 27 with spiritual leaders from around the world. As a way of participating prayerfully in the Assisi peace gathering and responding to the call to be people of peace,  the Coordinating Council of Spiritual Directors International will gather with people in New England, USA for an evening of contemplative practice, “Cultivating Compassion: Moving toward Peace.” Please join us near Boston on October 25 or consider creating a similar interfaith gathering for peace the week of October 27.

Reflection:

How does meeting regularly with a spiritual director move you toward peace? What contemplative practices help you respond to God’s call to be people of peace?

Religion. Spirituality. Communities of Practice.

What is sacred? Is it captured in stability and security? Or does moving toward exploration and transition describe your experience of the sacred. Stillness or motion? Or is it a community of practice? Both? And? Are their stages to understanding sacredness?

These questions are beautifully explored by Joseph McMann, who begins his article with work accomplished by Robert Wuthnow, Professor of Sociology at Princeton and the Director of the Center for the Study of Religion.

The article “employs an extended metaphor of journey or passage, that is, someone goes from one place to another, chooses a route, makes discoveries on the way and arrives at a destination. The journey is the inner journey of a person seeking, looking and finding a new spiritual home. The paper provides a framework or map, to enable one to observe where the journey may be headed. After all, when travellers have a general sense of the countryside, then they are less likely to feel lost.”

Follow this link to view the article in the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue.

C. John Weborg

On July 30, North Park University honored a longtime professor of theology by naming its spiritual direction center after him: the C. John Weborg Center for Spiritual Direction. This is excerpted from the North Park News:

The current president of the Evangelical Covenant Church, Gary Walter, was in one of the first classes Weborg taught. “I realized I was in the presence of a true giant in terms of understanding the ways of God," he said. Then, as now, “there was a presumption of profundity by the students.”

North Park Theological Seminary also honored the other three members of a “gang of four” who were instrumental in steering the Seminary to make spiritual direction an integral part of all its students’ education.

Fran Anderson joined the Seminary staff in 1975 and was the school’s first female faculty member. She first brought up the idea of supporting the students’ spiritual development in a more intentional fashion. Weborg developed the first course.

Jane Koonce had a recurring dream in which she saw herself teaching at North Park Theological Seminary. She met with Dean Rob Johnston and interviewed with the faculty. She remembers Weborg saying, “Jane, you are an answer to prayer. I need a spiritual director.” Saturday was her 88th birthday, so the gathering regaled her with a well-harmonized “Happy Birthday.”

Richard Carlson previously pastored an inner-city church and served as director of field education at the Seminary for 25 years. He has taught the beginning course at the spiritual direction center since its inception.

Nicholas Wolterstorff was Weborg’s choice to give the evening’s address. A professor emeritus of philosophical theology at Yale University, Wolterstorff told the gathering that spirituality, remembrance, and justice are inter-related. Christianity is uniquely a spirituality of remembering because it is a story-telling faith, with the work of Christ being at the center of the story.

“Christian spirituality that does not remember is a truncated spirituality,” Wolterstorff said. Christian memory is not merely an interior act of the individual but also a public act that expresses itself in serving the outcast and impoverished, he added.

To read more about C. John Weborg Center for Spiritual Direction, follow this link.

Contemplation Nation: How Ancient Practices Are Changing the Way We Live (on Amazon.com)

Explore ways that contemplative practices including prayer, meditation, mindfulness, and spiritual direction are transforming personal lives and society at large. Spiritual Directors International Executive Director, Liz Budd Ellmann, MDiv contributed a chapter titled,  Contemplative Practice and the Enrichment, Formation, and Training of Spiritual Directors.

You will discover several familiar Spiritual Directors International members and past educational events presenters in this book of essays including

• Mary Ann Brussat (Contemplative Practice and Online Communities);
• Rachel Cowan (The Growth of Contemplative Practice in Contemporary Jewish Life);
• Andrew Dreitcer (Contemplative Practice in Seminaries and with Clergy);
• Zia Inayat-Khan (Islamic and Islamicate Contemplative Practice in the United States);
• Richard Rohr, OFM (Action and Contemplation: A Christian Perspective);
• Donald Rothberg (Socially Engaged Buddhist Contemplative Practices: Past and Potential Future Contributions at a Time of Cultural Transition and Crisis).

For a complete list of the topics covered in the book, including the authors, follow this link.

Kudos and blessings of gratefulness to the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan for publishing the book. Fetzer sponsored an exceptional gathering of contemplative leaders in June 2010 to collaboratively learn about how contemplative practices are shaping the future. This exciting book is a compilation of the white papers presented at the gathering.