Finding the still point
In 1974 the late Henri Nouwen, teacher and writer of many spiritual books, spent 7 months in the Trappist Monastery of the Genesee in upstate New York. An inner restlessness drove him there. He writes in The Genesee Diary : “Maybe I spoke more about God than with him”.
In a full life as teacher and popular guest-speaker, he says he hated the busy-ness, but at the same time was dependent on it for his own self-esteem. When invitations did not come he felt bypassed and ignored. He asked : “Is there a still point where my life is anchored and from which I may reach out with hope and courage and confidence?”
At the Genesee Abbey the busy-ness was stripped away, and he was faced with his own inner life without outside distractions. Three times a week the Abbey produced 5000 loaves of “Monk’s Bread”. It was a very boring task which made Nouwen frustrated. “Manual work indeed unmasks my illusions. It shows how I am constantly looking for interesting, exciting, distracting activities to keep my mind busy and away from the confrontation with my nakedness, powerlessness, mortality and weakness.
“Uninteresting work confronts a monk with his unrelatedness, and it is in this confrontation that prayer can develop…. In prayer I can find a new sense of belonging since it is there I am most related.”
Nouwen also found that in his “stripped bare” situation he became disproportionately angry over small things – someone hadn’t thanked him; someone didn’t speak to him. Again he found that his sense of well-being depended on human recognition rather than God’s love. This experience drove him to search more deeply for God.
Nouwen’s life mirrors our own. At times we all feel an inner sense of restlessness, dissatisfaction, and a desire for deeper fulfilment in living. We are busy doing many things – good things, important things, but when they are stripped away, what remains? Faced with a broken relationship, redundancy, an empty nest, retirement, illness or bereavement, is there a “still point from which we can reach out with hope and courage?”
Recently I went on a clergy retreat for two days – my first for three years in which an extended period of transition had disrupted normal routines. I was beginning to feel I was running on empty, and the days on retreat allowed time apart for silence, reflection, prayer, and the regaining of a sense of God’s presence.
Silent prayer may be a bit threatening. How does one fill the time? What does one do? Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Wales, describes it as a time for stillness when there is an “awareness of a presence”, a sense that “you are held or attended to”. That sense of being held spiritually by God brings great release from anxiety, and one is filled with a sense of grace.
Jesus himself regularly practised times of prayer, coming apart from life to seek solitude with God. Alone in the desert with his Father he gained clarity of vision and assurance of God’s power for the ordeals that lay ahead. The late Bishop John Robinson described Jesus as a “window into God” – Jesus was so filled with the spirit of God that all who saw him saw the fullness of God. Jesus was styled Son of God because of this.
Over the years they travelled with him, the disciples likewise came to see God in Jesus. Today’s Gospel contains the powerful story of Peter’s confession that Jesus was the Messiah, the chosen one, the Son of the Living God. In John’s version (6.66-69), Peter says: “You have the words of eternal life. And we have come to believe that you are the holy one who comes from God”.
These accounts are of people centreing on God : Jesus centres in on God in his times apart in the desert; the disciples centre on Jesus, seeing in him the fullness of God, and we too can practise such centreing ourselves, as Henri Nouwen sought to do at the Abbey of the Genesee. We likewise may experience God on a daily basis as that still point at the heart of life from which our true fulfilment stems.
While at the Genesee Abbey Nouwen received a letter from his father, a pensioner in Holland, who wrote : “As a man on pension you see the world recede. No one needs you any more…. Thus the Abbey will be a good preparation for that time…”
Since the young Nouwen was 25 years away from retirement, the letter seemed somewhat premature. But he interpreted it in a spiritual sense : “If in a spiritual sense I could retire now, that is, become independent of the success of my work, then I could probably live much more creatively and be much less vulnerable”.
One other reflection from his time at the Genesee was on prayer : “Compassion lies at the heart of our prayer for our fellow human beings…. I cannot embrace the world, but God can…. When God became as we are, that is, when God allowed all of us to enter into his intimate life, it became possible for us to share in his infinite compassion”. Prayer, then, becomes the way in which not only do we find our own true being in the compassion of God, but we become part of God’s all-embracing compassion for others.
Later in life that compassion drove Henri Nouwen to become part of the worldwide L’Arche communities which provide a home for those who are often described as “handicapped”, but whom community members regard as equal members of God’s family with gifts and compassion of their own.
The seven months that Henri Nouwen had apart in the Genesee Abbey may be a luxury most of us cannot arrange, but the setting apart of space for silence and prayer on a daily basis, aided by periodic quiet days and retreats, is as life-giving and necessary for us on our own spiritual journey as it was for Jesus in his.
Quotations from “The Genesee Diary : Report from a Trappist Monastery”,
by Henri Nouwen
Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, NZ; 30 June 2002
