personal retreat
Earlier this week I headed up to Holy Cross Monastery’s Guest House for a personal retreat.
As a New Yorker you don’t realize that the Hudson extends north of the city…that its origins are far deeper & its aura more lovely & mysterious & lush, than the Hudson sandwiched between Jersey & Manhattan. At least I didn’t — until I took the train north, and encountered the Hudson Valley I had read about & seen paintings of. But having read/seen it as a kid growing up in Sunny California amidst ocean and palm trees, those stories and scenes were something like fiction. And so this felt like a storybook coming to life, all around me…
After getting settled in my room at Holy Cross, I made my way down the trail to the river bank:
I looked up to see an eagle soar before me, low to the water & close–I could really see it.
I watched in awe.
It was another encounter with an image coming to life — the cliched Americanism, the eagle. And chosen for good reason, I realized, for in life, the eagle is so beautiful, majestic, noble, elegant. I wanted to be like that eagle.
And this is who I met, just before I left to catch the train back to the city:
I felt so special.
Staying at a monastery introduced me to a new culture. After just a few days, I came to realize that the seeming simplicity of the brothers’ daily lives is synonymous with a discipline of form. At a glance it looks “easy” because it is so ordered–but how difficult it is to do this ourselves. Imagine daily living out of your own center of solitude (vs. loneliness–Henri Nouwen elaborates on this in Reaching Out), in the midst of city living–what an appealing/hopeful challenge. It might be like taking nature into your heart, stealing it into the city, and living out of it.
[...] after coming back to New York, I went on a personal retreat to a monastery on the Hudson. No cell phone, no computer, no music, no chatter. Among much reading [...]