Notes from A Retreat / 2025
1
Earlier this year, when the flowers started blooming in earnest, I began a long retreat. The expectation was that it would be brief – a few days, maybe a week. I was tired; the writing was meandering. A break, a rest – a respite of some kind – was called for.
The prayer that initiated (and which I expected to inform) the retreat was related to happiness – the way it is natural, inevitable and inspired. God had lifted me to heights I neither expected nor deserved; the word breathed in me, and I breathed in it. A sense of consolidation, of making fast my learning, was reasonable. Perfect me, Lord, that I might perfectly extend your perfection. That was the spirit of the thing.
I remember the quarter moon around the third or fourth day. Owls hooting where whispering cornfields turned into hills. I walked to the river and sat for hours beside ripples and currents gleaming in moonlight. Late May? Early June? I don’t remember. But when dawn came, and I walked back home, the Lord was waiting for me in the garden. When I opened my mouth to greet him – to decorate the morning air with praise and adoration – he waved me away.
“You want too much,” he said. “And don’t know what you want.”
That was how it began.
2
The “consolidation of my learning” was quickly scrapped in order to reflect (in part) on the distinction between “survival” and “fulfillment,” especially in the context of a spiritual practice that is grounded in following Jesus. Survival meant not dying; fulfillment was a level or more up from that.
The precipitating author was Jacqueline Grant who, citing Brenda Eichelberger, wrote that class differences mean that “while Black women are dealing with ‘survival’ issues, White women are dealing with ‘fulfillment’ issues” (White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus 200). The distinction – between fulfillment and survival, foregrounding race and class – haunted me. I couldn’t think about anything else. I didn’t want to.
Grant’s observation arose in the context of her thesis that the experience of being a black women in the United States – because of the specific way that class, gender and race intersect in that experience – aligns naturally with Jesus, both in his symbolic capacity as a suffering servant / redeemer and in his lived capacity as a radical activist possessed by a vision of a world governed by love instead of fear, a world in which nobody was excluded from safety, shelter, supper and care.
The most significant events of Jesus Christ were the life and ministry, the crucifixion and the resurrection. The significance of these events, in one sense, is that in them the absolute becomes concrete. God becomes concrete not only in the man Jesus, for he was crucified, but in the lives of those who will accept the challenges of the risen Savior of Christ (Grant 220).
“Today,” wrote Grant, this Christ who is “found in the experiences of Black women, is a Black woman” (220).
3
The flowers this year . . . my God. Peonies, bluets, lilies, tulips. Blue flag, dandelions, forget-me-nots. Violets, cosmos, sunflowers, hyacinth. They were everywhere all at once, and always overwhelming – the colors, the scents, the way they moved when summer breezes moved among them. Initially I wanted to share every blossom with you – a photograph, a poem – but every time I moved that way, the directive was clear and instantaneous. I was not to possess or perserve the flowers in any way. The work was to love them, and that had to include saying goodbye to them.
It was like that, the retreat. It was about giving attention but also letting go. I spent a lot of time outside wandering around the place, gazing at flowers in different lights, from different angles. I shared them with bees and butterflies and hummingbirds.
A kind of silence crept into my life, a kind of stillness. I stopped writing, stopped corresponding. Eventually I even let go of prayer – of the retreat itself – in order to be present, which meant giving attention to what was happening and letting it go.
I saw more deeply how the body longs for both survival and fulfilment. I gave attention to the mind, which takes the body as its subject, endlessly spinning both story and commentary|. The flowers grew larger, especially at dusk, glowing like lanterns in the fading light. They spoke to me of a dream that had passed a long time ago, and of a dreamer who was only just now waking up.
I called often on Jesus but he didn’t answer. Now and then I’d go back to the garden and press God. What is happening here? What do you want me to learn? But he didn’t answer either. You want too much, said the flowers. And don’t know what you want. But it was getting clearer.
4
As Grant uses the term, fulfillment means the satisfaction of psychological needs like the desire to be happy, meaningfully partnered, given to constructive work et cetera. Fulfillment matters! Obviously it matters. But in order for it to matter, the question of survival must be already consistently met. You have to be alive – and not daily focused on remaining alive – in order to linger with a friend over tea or take up painting or rescue cats or whatever.
Survival is fundamental. It’s upstream of fulfillment. Hence the question asked by Jesus: can you be fufilled while others can’t even survive? Even simpler: what is your responsibility to others?
That’s the question. The answer he gives (he doesn’t wait for you to figure it out on your own) is: your responsibility to others is to love them as you love your own self. Imagine the kindest, gentlest, most loving parent possible and then be that parent unto everyone you meet. Call the world “family” and mean it more literally than biology can imagine.
But that answer is also a challenge, right? How do we love the other as our self? There are dozens of reasons – good ones, too – that’s not possible.
Black women, said Grant, have faced that challenge. They’ve risen to it and resolved it, once and for all. You want to know how to love the one you hate? The answer is given. The problem is you don’t like it. You think it’s beneath you, you think somebody else should do it. You keep asking for another option and there isn’t one. This is it.
5
For Grant, taking Jesus seriously requires a “constructive Christology” (221). Christ has to address the problem of inequality, and the solution has to cash out in material terms. Everybody survives and everybody is fulfilled. God accepts no less and so neither can we. It’s a terrifying invitation to divine collaboration. The work is hard, you get next to no credit for doing it and that cross – my God that fucking cross – never quite goes away.
The commitment to struggle not only with symptoms (church structures, structures of society), as Black women have done, but with causes (those beliefs which produce and re-inforce structures) yield deeper theological and christological questions having to do with images and symbolism. Christ challenges us to ask new questions demanded by the context in which we find ourselves (Grant 220).
Following Jesus means being in dialogue with the world in all its messy – sometimes brutally messy – entirety. It means being in relationship with the world. Really really it means being present to the world. Dialogue is downstream of relationship. But relationship is downstream of presence. To be present is to accept (without qualification or condition) the body and to refuse the false comfort of past and future. There is only this: this this.
Accepting the body just means realizing that when you are on the beach you are not in the forest. When you are making love you are not baking a pie. When you stargaze you are not gardening. Very simple! But the effect is radical. The body perceived in the present is sacred and beautiful; it is connected to all the cosmos. It merits love, not violence.
Refusing the false comfort of past and future means avoiding nostalgia and fantasy. It’s fine to plan! How else can we meet for tea? It’s fine to remember a game or activity you loved as a child. But sometimes those memories and plans become distractions. They’re like movies we watch or stories we tell. They eat up our attention, leaving nothing for the reality unfolding here and now. A constructive Christology is a Christology of presence, a Christology of here and how.
6
At about this time, the woman at the well appeared. Do you know her? The woman at the well is codified in John’s Gospel (4:4-42), but her power is far beyond what can be constrained – or even symbolized – by mere text. The woman at the well is the one who tells you where to find Jesus. Really what she tells you is what’s fucked up inside you that makes seeing Jesus so difficult. Her light makes the absence of your light obvious.
In the presence of the woman at the well, everything simplifies. Do you want peace or conflict? Do you want to suffer or do you want to be happy? The simplicity of reality can come as a shock. There are no secrets, no mysteries. It takes neither effort nor time to be just as God created you.
Something had given me the flowers. Given me to the flowers? Something insisted I be present to them without doing anything else. But the woman at the well said, give attention to Jesus. Meet Jesus.
I got a little desperate then. I didn’t know how to see Jesus and I’d been pretending I knew for so long I couldn’t possibly admit my ignorance now. What would Jesus say? What would you say? I couldn’t see a way out. I was trapped.
Around this time, the flowers began dying.
7
Presence is a practice. It has a form. For example, most mornings and evenings I sit quietly in the darkness, folded in the shape of an apple, and breathe. It’s harder than it sounds! I want to have deep thoughts, or I do have deep thoughts and I want to write them down. Or I’m bored or curious. There’s something needs doing in the other room. I need to pee. Maybe I left the stove on?
It’s interesting to see our resistance to the present moment, to doing nothing, to just being. Ego is very clear in those moments. It’s the desire to be distracted. But from what? What is it that ego doesn’t want us to see? What is hidden in the present moment that the ego works so mightily, even viciously, to keep from being revealed?
The answer is, shared peace. Shared peace and happiness. It is actually incredibly easy to be happy and at peace with one another, and being that way is infectious and reparative. It’s natural. It invites others to share in itself; it is completely unafraid of sickness and death. There is no wrong or injustice it cannot see to correction. There is no wound it cannot heal. But there is no ego at all in it.
When Sojourner Truth realized the presence of Jesus in her she felt “such a love in my soul as I never felt before – love to all creatures.” But then she caught herself. Did “all creatures” include white people – the source of so much of her and her family’s and her people’s suffering? The beatings, whippings, kidnappings, lynchings? “But then came another rush of love through my soul and I cried out loud – Lord, I can love even the white folks!”
Grant says that Sojourner Truth’s love was “not a sentimental, passive love” but rather a “tough, active love that empowered her to fight more fiercely for the freedom of her people” (214). She models for us the Love of God, which does not rest until all beings, without qualification or condition, share in its healing and holiness. No body and no thing is outside the Love of God; this is our will too.
8
The violets were the last to go. A handful of them remained down by the compost, behind the blackberries, mummified by frost, hidden by November snow squalls. Every time I passed them, I murmured thanks. I accepted this dying, this plainness. I accepted all of it.
The okayness of the world and of this life gently clarified. God was present; Christ was afoot. Seeing Jesus is neither an event nor an accomplishment but a relationship premised on justice. We recreate it daily; it transcends the personal. The external loses its stranglehold; our will aligns naturally with God and God’s Coherence.
As the retreat ended, we put up the harvest and cleared the gardens. “I” became “we,” “we” became “us.” Understanding that language is downstream of communion, we allowed old hurts and grievances to surface. We watched them dissipate like eddies in a brook; we did nothing but give attention to their going. A voice spoke from beyond suffering, calling on us to become happy. God wanted us to be happy. Nor was our happiness separate from anyone else’s.
A lifetime spent judging wrongly and acting fearfully came into view. I wasn’t its author but there was another way. Addicted to comfort – spiritual, psychological and physical – I had participated in the suffering of the world. And I had ignored my role in that suffering, preferring to blame others.
But I wasn’t afraid of it anymore. I forgave myself, which meant seeing in clear and non-dramatic ways, a path forward for all of us. And I knew that you would share it with me because you were the one who showed it to me. This was how the retreat ended.
9
Ultimately, says Grant, for her and for Sojourner Truth, “the significance of Christ is not his maleness, but his humanity” (220). That is, beyond the world’s agreed-upon signs of identity, from which none of us are excepted, lies a common sign that we share with all life and all the cosmos.
What we share is a fundamental innocence, a potential for happiness and a yearning for communion. But to partake of this inheritance, we have to be free. We have to be free of hunger, free of abuse, free of coercion and free of fear. Humberto Maturana said that Love means that the other cannot be forced to justify their existence – they don’t have to beg for food, suffer from curable illnesses, or never have time to read a book to a child. Love means accepting the other without asking anything in return. There are neither kings nor servants in this world governed by Love. Just folks happily going about the work and play of being happy together.
I understand the way that this utopian view of the so-called Kingdom of God can seem naive and even dangerous. But I don’t care anymore. It was Jesus’s spiritual heritage, his life’s work and, nontrivially, his gift to us. He taught that love and justice are entangled and reach their full expression in the present moment presently lived. He put his mind and his body into the lesson. And he asks no less of us.
We have to go slowly. We have to be sure that healing heals and truth is true. Jesus is not about efficiency. He is not about winning or losing. The Kingdom of Love cannot be measured by spreadsheets. Rather, Jesus teaches us a way of being in relationship with the world that arises from our commitment to sharing the present moment with one another and to undoing structures of belief and systems of practice that make sharing the present moment so difficult. You can’t have one without the other.
Our spiritual inquiry cannot be resolved apart from our responsibility to one another. We are in this together and we need a lot of help. The suggestion is, Jesus can be that help. But how do we meet Jesus? Grant and Sojourner Truth say listen to women, especially black women. And I am. I am.
