Margaret River

Last week I was in Margaret River in Western Australia, giving some talks at the Perth Anglican diocese clergy school. I arrived before the conference started and so was able to have a 'Wednesday Retreat' on Monday morning, before we got underway.

It seemed important to connect to the place we were and introduce myself to it. So I walked through the little town - full of cafes and providore type shops - and headed for the river itself.

There was a 'rain garden' just before the river - trees, bushland and water grasses, designed to clean the polluted run-off from the road before it entered the river itself. Some of the shapes were stunning.

And then I came to the river itself.

My Mum's side of the family is from WA - but from the wheat-belt. The south-west of WA is renowned for its beautiful tall forests, and even in the short walk off the highway I came across some extraordinary Marri trees with stunning bark.

It was a greyish morning, but the reflections of the forest in the water were amazing.

And this too, is a reflection!

The question of 'country' is a fascinating thing. The more I become aware of the significance of this notion in Aboriginal culture, the more I wonder about my own sense of 'country'. And I realised that, although it is so beautiful, this Margaret River country does not feel like home to me - the forest and water feel a little dark and enclosing. I am more at home on the high plains and open fields.

But it was a privilege to visit the country of the Wadandi people and to enjoy its beauty and mystery.

Shalom,
Sarah

Lady Poverty

This week, I've been much struck by this passage from Christian Wiman's, My Bright Abyss.

'The endless, useless urge to look on life comprehensively, to take a bird's-eye view of ourselves and judge the dimensions of what we have or have not done: this is life as landscape, or life as resume. But life is incremental, and though a worthwhile life is a gathering together of all that one is, good and bad, successful and not, the paradox is that we can never really see this one thing that all of our increments (and decrements, I suppose) add up to. "Early we receive a call", writes Czeslaw Milosz, "yet it remains incomprehensible,/ and only late do we discover how obedient we were"'.

What resonates for me particularly is that 'endless, useless urge to look on life comprehensively'. I am so often seeking to know what it all means, or will mean in the end. And yet I know that the deeper knowing of the whole comes not from this 'bird's-eye', observer's view, but through participation. And truly to participate, to be present beyond self-consciousness, demands the surrender of that 'observation point'.

St Francis speaks, I am told, of embracing 'lady poverty' - embracing the void of unknowing, the loss of the 'I' who sees, becoming 'poor' in this radical way of self-dispossession. In the same way, John Main speaks of saying your mantra and being content to say your mantra - so becoming the eye that sees but does not see itself.

Yesterday in spiritual direction, and this morning on retreat, I practised this embrace - feeling still my resistance, and yet also drawn to this deeper embrace of no-thingness.

The trees are yielding themselves in the loss of their leaves - unable to do anything but enact trust that life breaks through on the other side of death, of winter. Embracing Lady Poverty ... on a winter's morning.

Shalom,
Sarah

Presences

It rained last night and the morning looked rinsed and sparkling. There were clouds around and a reasonable breeze, but it was sunny when I arrived at Lake Ginninderra and the raindrops glistened on the leaves of the trees.

I was struck immediately by a sense of the vivid presence of the life around me - a glossy feathered magpie stood in the middle of the car park singing, a small green shrub caught the light and the breeze spoke through the casuarinas. I was struck also by the many different species of tree in the small area of John Knight Park - perhaps the variety seems more obvious in autumn, as each tree turns (or not) in its own way - a plane tree, a sweet-smelling poplar, and then the bright yellow leaves showing up against the white-barked gums.

I tried to photograph the flurries of leaves falling, but ended up with a fair bit of indeterminate grass. But I had a little more luck with the moorhen on the rock, and the reflection of leaves in the water.

Then I made my way to the Benedictus island, where we celebrated Easter. A favourite spot for my retreat mornings is coming to be the 'back' of the island, in among the casuarinas, looking out across the water. It's sheltered a bit from the breeze, and from passing traffic. And it's amazing that, so close to the town centre, so close to the busy bike path and park, there is this tucked away place where the water birds forage in the lee of the island, the occasional water rat swims by, and the trees carry on their hidden life.

To be more fully present to all these presences is to begin to experience being part of a larger whole, to know myself (in Mary Oliver's words) a member of 'the family of things'.

I thought about the talks I'm preparing for a clergy conference where (inevitably) the theme touches on the question of the future of the church. Sitting contemplating the world like this I sense the invitation for the church is to let go self-concern. It's not about us. It's about simple availability for love's sake. The busy anxious church will not serve the deepest needs of our world, in fact will not even 'see' the world it purports to want to serve. Learning to see though - it's an invitation that is both gift and task.

Shalom,
Sarah

May Days

We have been having the most beautiful May days - crisp, sunny, still.

It's a while since I posted, but most weeks I have been managing my retreat mornings (well, quite a few anyway!). It's just that I haven't done so well with reflecting on them on the blog. But - as when any practice gets ragged - what is there to do, but begin again?

Here an image from earlier in the season - when I spent time in the Aranda bushland during Lent.

Today, though, it was the Botanic Gardens that called. On arrival, as usual, the space stilled me and filled me with gratitude for the time and the beauty of things. The banksias are flowering and magnificent.

The colours are almost impossible to believe, as is the intricacy and delicacy of each flower.

I was struck too by the clarity of the light across the woodlands. Light and shadow were in sharp relief, and the dew sparkled on the leaves.

I thought a bit about the relationship between shadow and light - both part of things, helping define each other. Seeing it in a landscape is one thing, of course. Embracing the shadow with equanimity in our lives and the lives of those we care about is something else again.

But touching, immersed in mystery, I sat and prayed and was renewed.

Shalom,
Sarah

Ash Wednesday

I am ten days late with this, but wanted still to share the images that struck me on Ash Wednesday this year, at the beginning of our Lenten journey.

We are using the ABM (Anglican Board of Mission) resource, Into the Desert, for our daily Lenten readings. It's a wonderful set of reflections, written by our friend Celia, and arises from her experience of desert dwelling (both geographically and spiritually). But it's made me wonder also about Lent in the city - and how to pay attention to that which comes through the cracks and fissures of our tidy suburban setting.

On Ash Wednesday, I set out from home seeking to attend not primarily to what strikes me as beautiful in our neighbourhood, but simply to what is there. To let the whole of it in.

Before I'd left our unit complex, I came across this little scene which seemed to confirm my intent - a neighbourhood cat searching through the rubbish. Busted!!

There's a strip of open space - a 'waste land', I'm tempted to call it - behind the houses across the road from us. I took photos of the rubbish bins by the garages, and the satellite dishes on the roofs, and these too.

I don't feel I have anything very wise to say about this. When you pay attention to anything, there's beauty to be seen. But - it's undeniable that on the 'back' side, so to speak, of these well manicured suburban streets and homes, there's a degree of ugliness and unkemptness. And I wonder about a form of life that produces this as a seemingly necessary by-product, and what it says about the state of our common soul.

I wonder about keeping a holy Lent here, about being in and with this landscape and inviting it to teach me.

'Into the 'burbs', we might call it!

Shalom,
Sarah

The One Centre

This week I've continued to ponder the call to move through the surface agitation of events, fears and distraction to come to rest in God and to source responsiveness here.

I've been thinking about the relationship between contemplation, action and activism and sensing that, despite the manifest need for action on many fronts, there is danger in allowing ourselves to get too caught up in activism. The danger is that the energy we expend in these ways ends up exhausting itself or (even worse) is somehow co-opted to fuel the very energy of destruction we seek to counter. What you resist persists, so the saying goes.

This is clearly a subtle matter calling for discernment. There is (I think) a real place for activism - for public protest against injustice, for creating communities of resistance and so on. But somehow the energy we bring to this needs to come not just from indignation, anger and fear, but from the non-anxious source of all things. It needs to be a response grounded in the energy of creation and reconciliation that can transform alienation and isolation into real communion, real peace.

In contemplation, this is the energy we seek to be awake to, receptive to, available for.

This morning, I went to the island in Lake Ginninderra, where we celebrated Easter last year. The island itself seemed agitated when I arrived. A very large flock of corellas has moved into the neighbourhood - they were noisy and felt like invaders.

The other birds seemed agitated - the crows were cawing and moving heavily through the trees; even the waterbirds seemed not quite themselves. But I found a spot among the she-oaks to sit quietly, and practised being still amidst the agitation. The water sparkled, the wind soughed in the trees and I saw a water rat swim by.

Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of meditation as a process of sinking deep into the ground of your being, just as a pebble thrown into water sinks to the river bed. John Main wrote similarly: 'The purpose of meditation for each of us is that we come to our own centre. In many traditions, meditation is spoken of as a pilgrimage - a pilgrimage to your own centre, your own heart, and there you learn to remain awake, alive and still' (Moment of Christ). What's important is that as you sink into your own centre, you discover 'there is only one centre' and that our life task is to learn to live out of that 'one centre'.

What makes this a journey of faith is the ungraspability, un-encompassability of the centre. We sense it, intuit it as we find ourselves drawn into its field, its orbit ... but we don't see 'it'. We can do no more than trust we are not deluded, and that our availability to this energy really is the 'one thing necessary'.

Shalom,
Sarah

Stillness

As part of our morning pre-meditation routine, I've resumed using the daily readings drawn from John Main's work in the collection Silence and Stillness in Every Season.

I think, in practising and teaching, I've tended to emphasise the understanding of meditation as a practice of silence. But in these daily readings, I've been quite struck by John Main's emphasis on stillness as well as silence.

Speaking of our call to be wholly at God's disposition, for example, and to begin to live out of the divine energy, Main writes: 'Stillness is the way to rootedness and it focuses the challenge that faces all of us, to be rooted in our true self. To put it another way, it is the challenge to be wholly open to the gift of our own creation. Stillness helps us to be rooted in the gift that God has give us in our own being, which we learn by being still in one place' [from The Way of Unknowing]. And he speaks of 'outward stillness' being an effective sign that draws us into being wholly grounded, rooted in God.

Last week, on my Wednesday retreat, I had an experience of this efficacy of stillness. There's always a little journey to make at the beginning of retreat - from agitation to stopping, from restlessness to rest. Even if I start off in a fairly unstressed, peaceful place, there is always a little transition into the deeper rest and openness of this time. And what I noticed was that simply by sitting still, that transition started to happen. Outer stillness helped settle my spirit.

So this week, as I took myself off to the botanic gardens, I was more aware of the significance of stillness as a contemplative practice, as a form of prayer. It was a beautiful late summer morning - with just a tinge of autumn hovering - a shift in the light, a less intense heat. And what struck me was the deep rootedness of the trees in the garden - their stillness - and how their still presence was such a joy to be with and alongside.

Their stillness and my stillness led me into a sense of deep rest. 'Rest' can seem a relatively 'thin' word - signifying merely an absence, a 'not' doing or working. But the experience of this kind of deep rest is an experience of plenitude, of fullness and completion. I thought of the way in which 'rest' and fullness goes together in the Scriptures - from God 'resting' on the seventh day of creation, to the Hebrews being instructed to keep the Sabbath day holy as a day of rest unto the Lord. And I thought of Jesus teaching: 'Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest'.

Rest is the gift that is there for the receiving, if we can sink into the ground of our being in God. And stillness of body, stillness of mind and spirit, is the way.

Shalom,
Sarah