Sabbatical reflections #6: into the woods

I've already mentioned Nicola Slee's book Sabbath, and one of its central questions: "where for you are the woods, the wilds?" Nicola's book takes its structure from one of Wendell Berry's sabbath poems: each chapter dwells with a different verse, or part of a verse, of the poem.

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places

where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

(from Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems)

Berry's poem, and Nicola's book, guided me through my week's retreat just as much as my retreat guide, a brother from the Community of the Resurrection, did. And although the woods behind the retreat house were far from 'wild' (many of the trees were old, but most had been planted intentionally, and most of the paths through the woods showed tell-tale signs of human construction - steps here, a little wall there), they too became an invitation to explore, to journey, to be still, to look and listen, to encounter.

"I wonder if this is natural, very normal, for this stage of a retreat? Space cleared, mind cleared, of the more mundane, day-to-day worries and 'to do' lists, the stuff of our deeper desires [and fears] surfaces and prowls around the clearing?" (Thursday, 7.40am)

"the invitation into the woods is surely an invitation to play... Sabbath is the invitation into the free, wild space where we may play with the magic of the woods, explore off the beaten path, enter the unbounded space of our hearts and imagination" (Sabbath, p.60)

One of the many 'surprises' of the retreat week for me was the reminder of how much my spirituality and sexuality are entangled. Thirsting. Fainting. Aching. Longing. Wanting. Words that occur again and again in the Psalms. But words that are intensely embodied.

"longing... For more than the homely image of the loving Father putting his arm round my shoulder and kissing me on the forehead - as welcome and as 'settling' as that image is, for me. It's more akin to the image of the wild Spirit tugging me by the hand and leading me, playfully, into the wild woods. Playfully? Yes. But more. Seductively." (Thursday, 8.30am)

I spent much of that Thursday walking with the Song of Songs. Its loving, and seeking and not finding, and seeking and finding, and holding and kissing and not letting go.

"Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away... for lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come..." (Song of Songs 2:10-12)

I was, I may have mentioned, a nerdy, socially awkward child. My discovery of a real passion for faith, for God, for Christianity, liturgy and worship, happened to coincide with the teenage years in which I would repeatedly fall head-over-heels for girls who - without exception, I think - never felt the same way about me. And being a nerdy and socially awkward teenage boy, I repeatedly made a complete mess of navigating the fine-yet-blurry lines between 'friendship' and 'something more'. There are women in the world (most of them, thankfully, still friends in one way or another) who were, for much of my teens, the long-suffering recipients of excessively wordy love letters. But over the same time period, I was also writing diary entries about my faith in just such wordy and passionate terms.

It's perhaps little wonder, then, that as a slightly-more-grown-up adult, with a rather more stable love life and a ministry as a priest in the Church of England, for a long time I looked back at my teenage years and wondered, with just a trace of concern, whether the passion of my Christian faith at that time might just possibly have had something to do with the lack of passion in, er, other parts of my adolescent life.

And from this distance, aged 43-and-a-half and with the generous space of sabbatical to think fresh thoughts in, I still think that's a pretty likely hypothesis. But. It doesn't mean the holy and intimate God, who was my loved and beloved, wasn't then - and isn't now. One of the dangers of doing faith for a 'job' is that it is possible, over time, to slip into believing that, if I wasn't paid to do it, I wouldn't do it. When faith becomes rotas, and committees, and the arrangement of chairs, and strategy, and all the other stuff that is a necessary part of the role of vicar (and it's not just true for vicars!), it's all too possible to lose sight of the love story between God and all of God's creation, at the heart of everything. Sabbatical time, retreat time, time in the woods, reminded me of this fundamental heartbeat. Every night at Compline in Mirfield, the final prayers included asking God to "renew [the Church] in her first love". At the heart of that retreat week for me was just such a sense of being renewed. And for that I'm thankful.

But unlike my teenage faith, the faith of this sabbatical-rested 43-year-old is perhaps liberated from at least some of the seriousness I had back then. Marriage and children have gone a long way to awakening a playfulness, the possibility of fun, in life for me - but both marriage and children can all too easily lapse into the domain of the serious too. Diary sessions. Having to plan in even the days off. Co-ordinating childcare. Deciding on secondary schools. Making sure homework gets done. And so on. This sabbatical time has re-awakened in me the desire to play with my nearest and dearest. To find new ways of playing, if the old ways no longer fit.

Among other things I brought back from my retreat week, was the decision (or better, enthusiastic acquiescence to growing pressure!) that we needed to get a family cat.