Pursuing Threads

I recently drove an hour north to attend a retreat sponsored by the district here in Charlotte. I turned off the main highway, meandered down a winding driveway and arrived at a very peaceful setting in the middle of the woods. I was greeted by a kind woman outside a newish looking farmhouse. The front door opened to a large room with several large windows sponsoring visual access to the woods around the house. There were already a number of other pastors drinking coffee and catching up. They were standing in the midst of twenty or so chairs that circled the living room. This was clearly the central location for the retreat.

Within a short period of time, we all took our seats and the convener began to speak. She spent the first ten minutes or so laying out the ground rules for the house and setting. She was basically reading the bullets from the green sheets that had already been placed on the chairs. After declaring that we needed to wipe our feet upon entering the house and assuring us that it was probably too wet for us to go out anyway even though their were several nice paths that led about the property, the convener turned to the task at hand. She told us that as pastors we were probably very busy people who spent entirely too much time with words. The remedy--the point of the retreat--would therefore be listening...in part, to one another; in part to her; and through all this, in some part to God.

We were told that the purpose of the retreat was to help each of us discover what it was that we are truly thirsting for. "After all," the convener said, "you cannot get filled until you understand what it is that you need." She then made the fatal mistake of giving us (or at least me) an out. She told us that we could choose to participate in this process or not. We could engage in the retreat as it had been so thoughtfully and purposefully planned...or not. "Maybe you will hear something this morning" She boldly proclaimed. "and that will be all that you can handle and you will want to chew on that the rest of the day."

This was the opening I was looking for. I didn't care what I might hear, it was definitely going to be as much as my poor, weak spirit could handle. I would therefore have to be off somewhere else chewing it over for the rest of the day. This seemed a fair enough compromise. I just could not bring myself to imagine anything renewing about spending a retreat inside a house, sitting quiet and still in a circle of strangers. With each passing minute, my straight-back chair further evolved into a torture device. I figured it would be wrong to just get up and leave so I decided that I would stay for the morning session. I wasn't sure where I would go but I knew that it wouldn't be atop one of those chairs.

Apart from the quiet time, the morning session consisted of thrice reading a poem called "The Way It Is." This is not the Bruce Hornsby song of the same name. It is rather a short poem written by William Stafford. I have included it toward the end of my blog.

It turned out that this poem was a gift in the midst of an otherwise uncomfortable and unhelpful event. It spoke to the very thing that was churning inside my stomach. Ah, that's it. I don't want to be here! With all due respect to the convener and those who were excited about the retreat, this was just not my version of spiritual renewal. Wherever it was that I belonged, it was just not in a semi-circle in the middle of a house in the middle of the woods where the most pressing message seemed to be a reminder to wipe my feet.

It's a freeing thing to know ourselves or even something about ourselves. But that freedom is not especially helpful until we are willing to act upon it--to say yes to who we are and say no to who we are not.

It's not that I look down on people who enjoy the kind of thing that I have just described. I just don't want to be someone who pretends to. And so, empowered by Stafford's poem, I left at the break. I tore out a sheet of paper and left a note for anyone who might get anxious over the empty chair. "Please do not be alarmed or bothered if I do not return. I am pursuing a thread."

There’s a thread you follow.
It goes among things that change.
But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

Stafford's poem and the picture above appear together here http://www.panhala.net/Archive/The_Way_It_Is.html