One of the few reasons that I still put up with Facebook is the Memories app, which will show me what I was posting on that day through the years. Usually it allows me to see pictures of when the two (wonderful) adolescents who live in our house were adorable tiny humans. What popped up this morning were pictures that I posted from a spiritual retreat I took to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky three years ago. Along with the pictures was the caption reading “This place has been very good for my soul. I hope I get the chance to come back again.”
I haven’t been back yet though I still hope to. Trying to remind myself of those few days at Gethsemani, I tried to look for my journal from that weekend to no avail. But I did find myself looking back to a difficult blog that I wrote a couple of weeks afterwards that contained the memory that was creeping on the edges of my mind:
I spent the last weekend of my sabbatical on a silent retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. It was amazing; a weekend that nourished and focused my soul. It was an introvert’s paradise that allowed me to read, write, hike, go to prayer services with monks, and not have to talk to anybody.
Often I would find myself staring at an evergreen tree outside the window of my room. Throughout the weekend, that tree would sway in the breeze. It was so quiet and peaceful and I would become transfixed by the gentle motion. For the first few days, I would not even think about it. I just rooted myself in my chair and watched the Invisible push and pull the branches….
[I remembered] the Hebrew word ruach and the Greek word pneuma. Words used for the Spirit of God but that also meant wind or breath. Spirit and wind, wind and spirit. The image of the Spirit-swayed tree held in my mind throughout the afternoon.
In the early evening, I was sitting out in the garden and the gentle breeze accelerated into a strong wind. Now outside, I looked up at my tree; its branches now bending beneath an invisible intensity. All this afternoon, I had been praying for clarity and direction; eyes to see and ears to hear. And now I felt like the wind was showing me what I needed to see.
“Wait, is that it? Is that what You’re telling me?” I said this out loud. To the wind. Maybe I did this because I barely said a word beyond chanted prayers all weekend. Regardless, I didn’t get an out loud answer to my out loud question, but in that moment I truly felt like I was being told that I was going to get to see God move in an incredible way, the Spirit would rush in and bring the branches of my world to life. This way of thinking is not normal for me. I am actually pretty skeptical of such things, but that was the clear sense that I had in that moment.
I remember hoping for one thing and the world unfolding in an entirely different way. I remember in that spiritually heightened place watching the wind move in the trees and believing that it was speaking to me about how I would get to see God move. It didn’t happen the way I thought it would. I don’t know if it has happened or will happen. Maybe it is happening in a painfully slow manner. I don’t really have an answer to any of that. There are days I still hope and there are days where, in the words of my sister, I let others hope for me. None of this resolves, but I thought it was pertinent to the season of Lent.