Winter Retreat: A Time of Leisure?

 By Sister Cecelia

We as contemplative monastics find that this retreat time contains schedules wherein many of our activities are not as time centered or time limited as usual. While many responsibilities need our attention—dogs need their usual care, and decisions can’t wait for retreat time to be over—we have some leisure to spend doing things we ordinarily don’t find time to accomplish. Extra reading, thinking, meditating, cleaning areas that are not on the housecleaning list, going through “stacks” in my office and other work areas to put in order as well as pitching and cleaning out.

As librarian, when I categorize new books and enter them into the computer, I want to read a good many more before putting them on the shelves! However, I limited myself to only three books during this retreat.

One is Radical Optimism by Beatrice Bruteau. Like the author, I once thought the word schola had to do with schools and scholarship. It turns out that the Latin schola comes from the Greek schole, meaning “leisure,” and this wider meaning is very important to the author. In her first chapter, “Leisure,” she describes how she goes from leisure to optimism. She says that we feel we could bear with misery, malevolence, sorrow, doubt, perplexity, and apparent absurdity if we could just see some meaning to it. She does not think the quest for meaning and the consequent alleviation of the misery can be done by dwelling on how sinful or sorrowful or hard life is.

What is the deepest truth of life? It is our union with the Absolute, Infinite Being, with God. Our perspective has to be different. Being on the periphery, among the twigs and leaves, gives an inaccurate slant on things. If we can shift our sense of identity to our root, to the source of our being in God, it looks different.

For Christians our model for being able to do this is Jesus. Filling our minds, our imaginations, our emotions with the belief that we can do the good that we intend is the most powerful help that can be brought to bear on our actual accomplishments. The contemplative life has always required an attitude of leisure, and leisure often results in contemplation. Does an attitude of leisure really require absolute free time? Leisure does not require that one be totally unoccupied.  If Jesus is our model, it is obvious from Scripture that life must be lived—but with the awareness that God is the center.

The distinction and shifting of our center of gravity, or sense of selfhood, from the ego-consciousness to a truer self is the core of our efforts to realize that God is our center. Ego-consciousness judges everything according to whether it is good or bad for me rather than whether it is good or bad in itself or within some greater whole or from God’s point of view.

Think of the present moment as the intersection of eternity with time. When our consciousness stays on this present moment, it rests and finds peace and is in touch with reality. We do need to think of the past and the future in order to make plans for the times to come. However, by contemplation we learn that the Eternal, the Infinite One coexists with the temporal, the finite.

To stay on this present moment, to quote Beatrice Bruteau: “We do by not doing and by undoing. …we begin with leisure, the relaxing of the sense of time, of the sense of ego-selfhood, of the sense of fragmentation. …The Hindus say that if you look at your mind and emotions as if at the surface of a lake, you will see your agitation as rough waves. But if you continue just to look at them and notice that you who are looking are not the agitated waves, then gradually those waves will subside. They will damp down, smooth out, and after a while the surface of the lake will be calm. Once the water is calm, it also becomes transparent. Then you can look down through it clear to the bottom. When our mind becomes clear and transparent, we can perceive what lies at the bottom, its foundation: it is the peace of God, the divine Eternity. Then the mind rests happily in this state, even while we go about our business, doing the things that need to be done.”