Silence is golden

I just returned on Saturday from a five-day silent retreat at the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusets, just step away from Harvard U. We were eleven clergy from all over N. America led by two of the brothers, Geoffrey and Eldridge.

It is hard to put the experience of holy silence into words. I felt supported by the old stones and blue stained glass of the Chapel. I felt included into a community of faith as we prayed with the brothers in the chapel and sang the psalms and canticles of the daily office. During my times of meditation in the Holy Spirit chapel I felt the ethereal presence of the Divine. This place is holy, I thought.

I am so grateful for the lives of the brothers who make this place possible for me and for any who would take some time apart to be still and know "I am". These brothers give their lives over to prayer, teaching, mission work, and creating a space for people to experience the holy.

I know that this monastery of the SSJE will remain a place of pilgrimage for me: a pilgrimage which I hope to do every year.

Easter is an attitude

Happy Easter! What?, you say, Easter was ages ago! But Easter is a season - it lasts for six weeks until the Ascension. But even more important than that: Easter is an attitude. Easter is the time and the place and the realization that God's love reigns over death and despair. No matter the circumstances which might try to entomb us, God's love has broken through that tomb, and won for us life and freedom.

There are all kinds of voices telling us that death wins. Voices (sometimes interior ones) which cut down and stomp on and choke off growth. Voices that tell us to get real, or get with the program. Voices that ridicule our naivte.

Easter tells us that the deepest, truest voices are the ones which are noblest: the voices which shout the glad shout of joy at the perfect love which God has for us. Such a love that he could not bear to be apart from us, and so came among us to be with us: to be us.

Knowing this, how can we be anything else but Easter people from now on?