Spending the Octave of Christmas in Tahoe!!

 Greetings from South Lake Tahoe!! Sister Sue and I drove up the day before yesterday. As some readers know, Sue's congregation has a retreat or vacation house there right on the lake. It is a small but lovely place and my favorite room is the sunroom, located at the back of the house (or maybe it's the front) which looks out directly on the lake. It is mainly made of windows and on one end (where I am sitting now) is a dining room table for 6-8 people where during the day I will work on Scripture, do some writing, and Sue will prepare her next courses for the University where she teaches maths and chemistry.

I have brought several things with me for this next week: 1) the books I need for a course on 2 Corinthians I will be doing at my parish (this includes a massive tome: NT Wright's new Introduction to the NT and its world which was "Santa's" gift to me from my pastor --- a book I believe will be used by introductory courses for undergraduate and maybe graduate studies in NT everywhere for some time), 2) When Silence Speaks, a book on Carthusian  spirituality by Tim Peeters, 3) Persons and their Growth, a comprehensive look at the nature of the methodology and process my Director and I are using together for personal formation, and 4) pencils and paints so I can color/paint both as part of this work, and for recreation and relaxation. (My Christmas present from Sue was a coloring book of Cats by B Kliban so I am completely set for this!)

There is no set schedule here but the rhythm of the days for me go something like this: middle of night (2:00-4:00) prayer, then back to sleep (my usual schedule has rising at 4:00 and that was true today); 8:00, morning prayer and breakfast. 9;00 or thereabouts --- to work on Scripture. The evenings Sister Sue and I will pray and celebrate communion together, fix dinner (Sue's a great cook, me -- not so much!), and then watch TV (Sue brings DVD's of PBS programs, concerts, etc) and just talk. Night prayer and bed is whenever we feel like it individually.  I brought the book on Carthusian thought because it ties in with what I have written here recently about the silence of solitude. Carthusians understand solitude in the positive way the Camaldolese and I do: it is about coming to wholeness and completion with/in God. They seem to understand silence in a correlative way as well: a kind of stilling of the passions, voices of anguish and yearning of our hearts as we draw closer to union with God who heals, comforts and completes us. At the same time they have a clear sense that one piece of stilling all of these is suffering from and in them as well. (It is impossible to satiate one's deepest hungers, needs and potentials unless, of course, we have allowed ourselves to feel these keenly and come to understand them right to their roots!)

I brought the PRH text,  Person's and their Growth,  because I am coming to a new place in my growth and need to reread the book from this new perspective. One question I have received from a reader recently (see below) has to do with my need to do this inner work/personal formation and whether it indicates that I was professed prematurely or was even unsuited to this vocation. The very cool thing about PRH is that it is about coming to wholeness and holiness in whatever call one has discerned. Yes, if a person has lived with profound woundedness from childhood or later in life, it is an excellent way to work with an accompanist and heal these wounds, but more profoundly (because deeper than this woundedness) the human person has a deep self, the one they are called to be and become over time and through the grace of God. PRH is focused on coming to live this deep true self in all of its fulness, so once one has done with the healing portion of things (or largely so) one continues on with the process.

What is especially astounding to me is the way the process works at all levels of the person's being and at whatever level of growth.  Though it rarely uses the word God, it is well conceived with God and the human potential which is God's eternal gift to us lying at our core at its heart. In-one-on one accompaniment (the kind my Director does with me) the work is explicitly Christian and faith-based --- because she and I are both Religious and bring the reality and language of grace and our personaly commitment to God into the entire process. Prayer and what occurs there is a regular feature of the work and the "process" and it is a joy to be able to speak of these things to someone who understands and lives them well --- indeed, far better than I do -- herself!

The question: [[Dear Sister, on the basis of what you recently wrote about the church's implicit commissioning of you to do the inner work you referred to, it seems to me that your need to do this work really could just mean you were professed prematurely or have no eremitical vocation at all. Shouldn't this kind of work be done before such important steps and decisions? You yourself have argued that it is best to have such personal work well in hand before seeking admission to profession as a hermit.]]

Response: It is possible that one's need for healing points to the fact that they have no call to eremitical life; they may well have embraced eremitical solitude because they can't live with themselves or others, because they have failed at life more generally and are seeking to escape all reminders of that, or done so prematurely because they are called to a more temporary period of therapeutic solitude during which they deal with whatever issues they have (bereavement, serious illness and other losses, etc.). But it is equally true that eremitical silence and solitude provide a proper context for undertaking the work of deep healing and reconciliation in an intense and focused way. Indeed, they are a very great gift of God in this undertaking. Each person with her Director's assistance will need to discern which is true --- and this means, of course, that it is possible to come to a point of healing where one also knows for certain that one is NOT called to eremitical life as a life vocation. But again, it is equally possible that one will find one is called to such ongoing and ever deepening work because one is called to holiness precisely as a hermit.

As I have written here before, in my  own work I have come to see the way God accompanied me my whole life and helped prepare the heart of a hermit. Physical solitude (not always voluntary or chosen) was almost always a part of that preparation as was my own awareness of God's presence. Thus, what has occurred is that I have found that with some fundamental healing accomplished, I am more certain than ever that eremitical solitude is meant to be the vocational context for the whole of my life and so I will also continue the personal formation through whatever comes next, and after that as well, and do so within the context of canon 603 profession and consecration. While, as you rightly note, I continue to believe that one's foundational healing needs to happen before admission to life profession the inner work I am speaking of is not merely about this kind of healing but about a deeper and deeper reconciliation of oneself with one's deepest self, with all of humanity and creation, and with God who is the very ground and source of one's being.

All of this is what I was referring to when I wrote in a recent post about the Church's act of professing me having implicitly commissioned me to undertake whatever healing and formative work was necessary, and to do so in an intense and focused way. My profession explicitly commissioned me to explore the depths and breadth of contemporary eremitical life under Canon 603. (Arch)bishop Vigneron explained this was so in his homily to me and to the assembly as a whole. What I am finding, what is affirmed again and again in many ways, is that it is eremitical solitude which is my vocation and which itself calls for something like PRH (some way of or approach to personal formation) and enables me to experience my call to ever greater depths and levels of personal wholeness --- beyond the healing of woundedness, beyond the relative comfort of life untroubled by such woundedness and fruitful in all of the ways one might live out this particular wholeness in parish ministry, the academy, hospital chaplaincy, or wherever --- and into a deeper call to genuine holiness in communion/union with God in and as an instance of the silence of solitude.

It is precisely my commitment and fidelity to my vocation which allows me to undertake this process of personal formation with the kind of depth and rigor it requires. As I began to do this work (and long before really), I realized freshly I was hungry for this kind of formation. I had had a sense of yearning for it in the Franciscans and later on as well. When I first began working with my spiritual director back in 1982 or so I fought her on this approach to personal growth, was resistant to it, distrusted it and was perhaps even frightened by it and the demands (and promises) it embodied. Sister Marietta didn't push, though she did offer bits and pieces that were helpful --- tools I could use without "buying the whole package," so to speak; she also continued to teach me whenever I needed her to, and kept encouraging me in ways which tacitly pointed to the power of PRH in spiritual/personal formation. I had no sense what a truly great gift she was offering me. And eventually I became capable of receiving it, and more eventually (within just the past few years, in fact), of seeing it as the great grace it is not just for personal healing of past wounds, but --- especially in conjunction with my eremitical life of assiduous prayer, Scripture, etc --- as a means to responding to God's invitation to genuine holiness and union.

Meanwhile, this early morning, here I am in the dark sunroom in the Dominican House (Our Lady of the Lake) at Tahoe. It is just 6 am, though I have been up for some time now, and the sun is beginning to show itself in the light pinkish brown aura and lightening sky above the mountains across the lake. I understand that somewhere in the sky beginning 28. December there will be a new celestial presence --- perhaps a comet which has never before made its appearance in this part of the universe. Christmastime is about newness of course, new birth, and it seems to me that this particular new celestial presence could well be prophetic -- as was true of the "star" that guided others to Jesus in Bethlehem. For me this presence will  mark a step into and along the deeper journey to personal holiness as I continue to explore the depth and breadth of my vocation in the constant presence of God and  with the support of my friends, parish, and the accompaniment of my Director. I hope the same sense of God's presence and accompaniment will be true for all of you in whatever way your journey takes you further and deeper into the great Mystery we call God! Merry Christmas!!