SPE Program Spotlight
At “Called Back to the Well,” Silence is the Teacher
In the high desert of New Mexico, on a mesa overlooking Albuquerque and the Sandia Mountains, nine people sit in a room, quietly eating. Except for the occasional thunk of a water glass being set on the table, or the clatter of a fork on a plate, not a sound is made. Staring out at the desert, glancing up at the ceiling, looking at their plates or one another, they say nothing, either to each other or to themselves. Instead they simply eat in silence.
At first glance, it’s a sterile and barren scene. Outside, the empty, lifeless desert—sand and sagebrush—stretches for miles. Inside, stillness blankets the room.
But in the desert, the emptiness is an illusion. In reality, it teems with life. Animals large and small—lizards to rattlers, prairie dogs to coyotes—move about or rest in the shade, waiting for the cool of night. Hundreds of plants—wildflowers, grasses, cactus, trees and shrubs—thrive in the harsh environment, storing water or putting down deep roots that stretch almost to the water table.
Likewise, inside, life is blooming as well. In the silence, important work is underway. Lives and ministries are being revived and transformed. Pastors all, the nine are putting down their own taproots, digging deep into their souls. Participants in a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project known as “Called Back to the Well,” they are discovering in the silence both themselves and God. They are becoming more aware of who they are and who God is, more attuned to God and God’s presence and call.
Sponsored by the Samaritan Counseling Center in Albuquerque in partnership with the Norbertine Community at the Santa Maria de la Vid Priory, Called Back to the Well seeks to foster spiritual vitality as an essential element of pastoral excellence. Under the program, pastors primarily from a five state region of the Southwest (New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Texas) participate in either nine-month peer support groups held in selected cities throughout the region or in intensive four-day retreats held at the Norbertine Retreat Center in Albuquerque. Since its inception in 2004, Called Back to the Well has also added a one-day “Clergy Sabbath” spiritual retreat, held monthly at the retreat center.
Whichever path Called Back to the Well pastors choose—four-day retreat, peer group, or one day Sabbath—they can expect to spend a lot of time in silence, says the Rev. Sue Joiner, the program director. On the four-day retreat, for example, which runs from Monday to Thursday, 36 hours are spent in complete silence, from 9 a.m. Tuesday to 5 p.m. Wednesday.
“Silence is the common thread that runs through everything we do,” she says. “Rather than looking to a great teacher or profound content or book to read, we encourage people to go inward and to pay attention.”
At Called Back to the Well, the silence, the desert, and the retreat center itself, with its remarkable architecture and carefully selected artworks, combine to create sacred space that fosters spiritual awareness, says Joiner.
“The silence is a teacher, the space is a teacher and the natural environment is a teacher,” she says. “As a result, we feel like we don’t need to be teachers. We just try to facilitate the retreats and make it hospitable for the participants.”
Often nebulous and ill-defined, spirituality is easily neglected in the day-to-day busyness of pastoral ministry, says Joiner. Yet, it is an essential part of sustaining pastoral excellence, she insists.
“Spiritual vitality has to do with the need that we all have to function and to act out of the depths that are in us,” she says. Yet, so much of what pastors learn in seminary and later in continuing education classes are the outward skills and tools of pastoral ministry, such as preaching, scriptural knowledge, counseling, and administration.
“But the wisdom and the ability to be centered and to have a clear sense of who we are and who we are called to be come from within us and not from the outside,” says Joiner.
For the Rev. Scott Sharp, a United Methodist pastor in Albuquerque, Called Back to the Well was exactly what its name suggests: a calling back and return to a deep source of spiritual vitality that had once been a major part of his life, but which had grown dormant. Earlier in his ministry, during eight years as a pastor in Oklahoma, Sharp regularly engaged in various spiritual disciplines, attending retreats, participating in pastoral prayer groups, and even undergoing Ignatian spiritual training under the guidance of a spiritual director.
After he moved to New Mexico when his wife got a job at an Albuquerque church directing a program for the homeless, Sharp took a brief leave of absence from pastoral ministry. Working at a golf course to fill the time, Sharp soon fell into a rut. During his eight months at the course, he would see the same golfers day after day and have the same brief superficial conversations with them every time.
“I began to realize that I do that with a lot of people and that relationships, even in pastoral ministry, can get very patterned,” he says. “I saw that if I wanted to connect with people in a deeper way, then I needed to connect with myself and God in a deeper way. I realized that community, spiritual formation and my own connecting with God were important, and that I had none of those.”
Deciding to return to ministry, Sharp was appointed two years ago as pastor of Covenant United Methodist Church in Albuquerque. About the same time, he heard about Called Back to the Well and soon enrolled in one of the nine-month peer groups. After that group ended, Sharp re-upped for a second nine-month group, and this fall is leading a men’s pastoral peer group for Called Back to the Well.
“It has been a great experience to be back with other clergy, who are also trying to sort stuff out,” he says. “When I have an active spiritual life and I’m feeling connected with God, I’m much more able to be agile in ministry. When I’m not in that good spot, it gets lived out in frustration. I don’t greet things with grace, and I struggle more.”
To Sharp, “spirituality” is about paying attention to God.
“I’ve learned that God is in the whole thing,” he says. “Spirituality is not some category separate from the rest of my life. When I talk about spiritual formation, I’m talking about paying attention and heightening my awareness of what God is doing in every part of my life.”
Unfortunately for most people today, life is so consumed by busyness and rushing about that they believe they have no time to sit in silence or engage in other spiritual practices, says Sharp. Yet, being silent, paying attention and being aware of God’s presence can be the very thing that helps people get through the busyness, he says.
Like Sharp, the Rev. Sarah Moening also found in Called Back to the Well a return to spiritual practices that had once been a major part of her life. But even more, the program helped her to heal deep and painful wounds. Raised a devout Roman Catholic, with roots on both sides of her family, she had worked in various lay positions in the church during her 20s, but increasingly found that those jobs did not satisfy an abiding ache to serve God. After struggling for three years with a growing call to ordained ministry, Moening left the church when she was 32, became a Lutheran and entered seminary
Although she immediately loved the Lutheran church and its theology, she carried within her feelings of sadness, loss and anger at the Catholic church.
“You cannot help but feel rejected when you can’t follow where God calls you within your own faith community,” she says.
After completing seminary and being ordained in 2000, Moening was called as pastor of a small Lutheran congregation in Cheyenne, Wyoming. After about four and a half years—right on schedule for many new pastors—she began to experience the first signs of pastoral burn out.
“It’s a demanding job, where the lines get blurred and it’s hard to take care of yourself,” Moening says. “I knew I needed to do something or it wouldn’t be pretty.”
After receiving a Called Back to the Well flyer in the mail, Moening signed up for a four-day retreat, not fully understanding that it would be held at a Catholic monastery, the Norbertine retreat center in Albuquerque.
Later, when she realized the location of the retreat, she was terrified.
“I was really scared,” she says. “I was just so tired of being rejected, of being a non-entity in the church I grew up in. How was a Catholic environment going to react to me as an ex-Catholic woman who was now an ordained pastor?”
On the long drive to Albuquerque, Moening thought many times about turning around and going back to Cheyenne, but every time, decided to press on. When she arrived at the center, she was stunned.
Fr. Francis Dorff, O.Praem, a Norbertine priest who co-directs the retreats with Joiner, welcomed Moening warmly. Facing her fears head on, she chose to have him serve as her spiritual director during the retreat.
“I can’t even begin to say how healing it was to be in his presence,” Moening says. “It was so affirming the way he accepted me. To have a Catholic priest look me in the face and accept me as a pastor was overwhelming.”
In her first meeting with Dorff, it was all Moening could do just to sob for 45 minutes. But Dorff understood.
“He didn’t turn away and say, ‘Oh, here’s another angry Catholic woman,’” Moening says. “He accepted the pain that I had experienced. He kept saying that it wasn’t just my experience, but it was a universal pain that was being embodied in me as an individual. For somebody to recognize that was huge for me.”
Since that initial Called Back to the Well experience, Moening has returned three times to the monastery to work with Dorff, who now serves as her spiritual director.
“For me, it was truly being home, but it was a home that had rejected me,” she says.
Called Back to the Well, Moening says, helped her recover a part of herself that she had lost. Since becoming a Lutheran, her Catholic spirituality had fallen to the wayside, but now she is drawing upon it again, integrating it into her ministry in Cheyenne.
“Called Back to the Well helped me remember the fullness of who I am,” she says. “I am a person of both the mind and the spirit, and I learned that I need both of these if I’m going to be sustained in ministry for the long haul.”
Sustaining an active spiritual life over the long term is one of the biggest challenges facing Called Back to the Well and any pastor who wants to have an active spiritual life, says Joiner. After a spiritual retreat, pastors almost always experience a spiritual “high” and feel revived for ministry. But keeping that passion alive, undergoing true long-term transformation, is difficult unless the pastor has a supportive community in which to integrate those experiences, she says.
Unfortunately, most pastors find very little incentive and support for spiritual practices among their congregations and denominational officials, says Sharp.
“The thing is, it’s hard for a pastor to say to a congregation member, ‘I spent some time in quiet reflection,’” says Sharp. “You can say ‘I spent an hour in the hospital visiting,’ but if you say ‘I spent an hour in silence,’ they’ll say ‘Why don’t you get to work.’”
Ultimately, Joiner says, spiritual vitality is essential at all levels of church life. Silence, prayer, and other spiritual practices are not just for pastors but should be a part of life for pastors’ families, congregation members and denominational officials. This summer, Called Back to the Well held its first retreat just for denominational officials and found it a great success.
“I find that whoever comes to our retreats always show up ready to go,” she says. “But I’ve never seen that as intensely as it was with the judicatory folks. They were so hungry to make these connections.”
So far, both Sharp and Moening are managing to keep their revitalized spirituality alive, both by actively practicing various spiritual disciplines and by “returning to the well” whenever necessary. In addition, in small ways, they are also trying to incorporate many of their spiritual practices into the life of their congregations. In Moening’s church in Cheyenne, for example, she and a handful of Lutherans gather one night a week for a regular session on centering prayer. And in Albuquerque, Sharp increasingly uses spiritual practices in pastoral counseling, whether silence, prayer, lectio divina, or journaling.
“I’m inviting them to look at their lives in a different way,” he says. “That’s essentially what spirituality is about.”
Read more about Called Back to the Well and the Norbertine Retreat Center.
