An Experience of Depth Ecumenism
Four times during the past year, groups of eight to ten Christian ministers from four or five different denominations gathered at the Norbertine Hermitage Retreat in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a five-day retreat known as Called Back to the Well. Sponsored by the Samaritan Counseling Center of Albuquerque, Inc., and the Norbertine Community, Called Back to the Well is one of 63 Sustaining Pastoral Excellence programs funded by Lilly Endowment Inc.
As one who helped design and direct a pilot version of Called Back to the Well for several years, I wasn’t surprised by much of what happened in the retreats. I was not surprised by the daunting challenges and the physical and spiritual exhaustion that many ministers brought with them. Nor was I surprised by the retreat’s programmatic elements--the intense experiment with solitude, silence, meditative writing, various spiritual disciplines, group and individual spiritual sharing and direction, and communal prayer. I was not even surprised by the remarkable fact that Methodist, United Church of Christ, and Catholic ministers would be open to attending a retreat co-directed by a Methodist woman minister and a Roman Catholic priest.
But what did surprise me—and continues to amaze me--was the atmosphere of deep communion that emerged among us as the retreat progressed. As I experienced it, this atmosphere of deep communion was not the product of anything we did or planned. We did not “work at it,” cause it, or consciously strive for it. In fact, at first this sense of deep communion remained largely unconscious, but soon it became undeniably present. It was as though it just began to show up in between us as the retreat progressed and to become a communally experienced fact of the Mystery in which we live and breathe and have our being. It showed up as a surprise and let us realize that, even though we really did not know one another very well personally or denominationally, our common meditative practice had taken us to a place where we are undeniably one. Many who took part in the retreats had this same surprising experience of communion, which they expressed and described in various ways. One way I am beginning to describe it now is as “an experience of depth ecumenism.”
As I look back in wonder at this experience of deep communion, I see it anticipated in the keynote text from the Gospel of John (4:1-41) with which the Called Back to the Well retreats begin and in the keynote meditative process that the retreats embody.
A Keynote Biblical Text
We begin the Called Back to the Well retreats by sitting together around the Water Rock in the gathering space of the Santa de la Vid Priory’s new church and prayerfully re-experiencing the meeting of Jesus with a Samaritan woman. As we listen, Jesus gracefully guides this meeting through the woman’s cultural and religious taboos, her many lives and the very real denominational differences between Jews and Samaritans. But the real meeting does not take place there. It takes place where the woman’s deepest desire meets Jesus’ deepest promise. It takes place where the woman’s thirst for life-giving water and the Coming of the Messiah meets Jesus’ promise that he is the Source of the living water she desires and the personal realization of her Messianic hope.
Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. . . the hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth; and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship him. God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and truth. (John 4: 21-24).
From this experience of deep communion, the Samaritan woman runs off to spread the good news all over town. Meanwhile, we who are being “Called Back to the Well” as she was, enter the meeting place of our retreat.
A Keynote Meditative Experience
At the heart of the Called Back to the Well retreat is a spiritual journey in meditative writing that we make together following the soul-stirring text of Ira Progoff’s book, The Well and the Cathedral, (Dialogue House Library, New York 1977). Through the movement of the meditation’s religiously neutral symbols, our journey begins by allowing the “muddy waters” of our busy ministerial lives to become quiet and clear so that they may reflect from the depth of our lives. Our meditative journey continues with the experience of passing through the center point within us, into “the well of our self” and through the full depth of our personal “well” in the “underground stream” whose living waters are the source of all of our individual wells.
We are exploring together
In the underground stream.
Each of us came down our own well.
Alone
As a private person,
But we are all meeting here
In the underground stream.All our separate wells
Lead to this underground stream.
It is the deep resource
for all of us,
All our wells draw from it.
It is our source of supply.
These moving waters
Are home for each of us.There are no separations here.
We intermingle freely . . .
We share
The unity of Being.
We share
The unity of Being
In the Silence . . . In the Silence.(Pp. 11-115)
Our meditative journey concludes with an experience of the painful paradox of how, if we are not careful, the cathedral on the surface of our lives, which is meant to mark the site of the well within, can actually cover the well that leads to the underground stream. But how beautiful the cathedral becomes when we experience it personally as an entryway into the place of deep communing.
Entering the cathedral
Wherever we may be,
The center point within us
Becomes the well
That opens inward.
We move into that well
And beyond it.
Into the buoyant waters
Of the underground stream
Where we are now . . .
Joining those
Who have been here before us
In the timeless unity,
In the timeless unity
Where we are now
In the Silence. . . In the Silence.
(P. 147)
We spend the final evening and morning of our Called Back to the Well retreat celebrating all we have experienced and reflecting on how we can bring our deepened connection with the Source of these living waters back to our busy ministerial lives, to the people whom we serve, and to the institutions we seek to transform. Through these reflections the retreatants generate a host of creative ways to make Called Back to the Well a moveable feast in their lives and their congregations. As impressive as these creative strategies are, I am beginning to think now that perhaps the most important outcome of all is the atmosphere of deep communion that the retreatants carry home with them.
The Experience of Depth Ecumenism
This experience of deep communion is hard to describe but very easy to notice. It manifests in the retreatants as an inclusive, non-judgmental, non-competitive, spiritually supportive attitude toward one another. It carries with it an inner sense of hope and peace and a great sense of wonder, gratitude and praise. It promises to create the context for genuine dialogue wherever the ministers go.
To my mind, such an experience of deep communion is genuinely prophetic because it witnesses to the actuality of a unity in Spirit that is yet to be realized in our deeply divided personal, political, and religious lives. As such, it is a wellspring for creative changes that eye has not yet seen and ear has not yet heard, but that faithful hearts continue to long for. As the hymn that has become the theme song of the Called Back to the Well retreat puts it,
Glory be to God, whose power working in us,
Can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.
(Ephesians 3:20)
The first grant proposal that the Samaritan Counseling Center and the Norbertine Community submitted to Lilly Endowment was perceptively refused because it focused only on the individual minister and did not include ways of impacting the living systems of family, congregation, peers, and denomination in which the minister is intimately involved. The revised proposal that was eventually accepted tried in a modest way to begin to bridge this gap.
In all of our strategic planning, however, we never anticipated what, to my mind, is the experience with the most systemic implications of all for sustaining pastoral excellence. We never anticipated the experience of depth ecumenism. It came to us as a gift, a great surprise, and a heartening promise. It allowed us to experience personally that, just as the Kingdom of God, so also the communion we deeply desire is within us. This is an experience with the widest possible personal, social and religious implications. It could change the whole atmosphere of the deeply divided world in which we live.
Fr. Francis Dorff, O. Praem, is a Norbertine priest and a member of the Norbertine Community of New Mexico. He is the author of The Journey from Misery to Ministry (Ave Maria Press, l998), Simply Soul Stirring: Writing as a Meditative Practice (Paulist Press 1998) and other books.
