c. 1997 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ All summer long, self-help author Jennifer Louden has been the expert-du-jour on the daytime TV talk-show circuit, explaining why women periodically need to withdraw from the world, the company of men and the demands of their children to seek solitude and spiritual renewal.
She tries not to sound glib as she describes to Oprah and countless, clueless cable anchors her paint-by-numbers approach to personal holiness, as contained in”The Woman’s Retreat Book,”newly published by HarperCollins.
Retreat, she explains, is a practice that needs to be resurrected in our times. The periodic separation of women from the rest of the community was once woven into the fabric of life in virtually every culture: In primitive cultures, seclusion was a survival tactic (wild animals could smell menstrual blood).
But it evolved into ritual over the centuries, from the women of ancient Greece, who periodically withdrew for purification and celebrations of birth and renewal to the medieval Christian hermits known as anchoresses, who lived lives of elegant solitude and prayer.
Women today, pressured by jobs, kids, spouses and responsibilities, are searching for similar oases of spirituality. In a book she describes as a”thesaurus of sacred solitude,”Louden maps out the ways they are finding it: organized church or synagogue retreats; wilderness encounters; a spirit-reviving bath or massage, or a few stolen hours of solitude, as novelist Virginia Woolf styled it, in a room of one’s own.
Talking about spiritual renewal is far different from actually achieving it. And after another grinding day on the road promoting her book, Louden, a 34-year-old wife and mother of a 3-year-old, confesses to being so frazzled that her only retreat is to the mini-bar in her hotel room to gorge on chocolate and junk food.”I was so bone-crushingly tired from the stress, the rudeness, the coldness, the fakeness that I found myself asking, `What kind of a refuge is this?’ I wanted to go home, get in my pajamas, go to bed and stay there,”she said.”The entire month of August is going to be a retreat for me.” (BEGIN FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM)
Louden acknowledges that her ideas of a self-directed retreat are far less rigorous than, say, the spiritual disciplines of a Zen Buddhist or Christian monastic. But even though she might seem like a lightweight compared to Kathleen Norris, a laywoman whose best-selling memoir”Cloister Walk”recounts her periodic residence in a contemplative community, Louden resists the idea that her spirituality is self-indulgent.
She also resists being labeled a New Age writer, and casts herself more as pan-religious. Raised a Baptist, once a Buddhist and now a Unitarian-Universalist, her spiritual quest is not couched in traditional ideas of God, but in finding the”authentic self,”the god within. “Kathleen Norris is all about depth and discipline _ how can a bath compete with that?”asks Louden with a self-deprecating chuckle.”There is a rigor to (my) kind of retreat. To enter a contemplative state means penance and grief are involved. It’s about confronting all the ways that we’ve failed ourselves and our values. It’s about confronting the god in me _ the god who looks like me. It’s a scary process and fear is what keeps us from pursuing it. But what arises from the experience is awareness and the energy to do what must be done.” (END FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM)
Louden’s most profound spiritual experiences have been rooted in nature, in small groups of women who take to the woods or wild rivers to be alone together and to allow their souls to expand in the wilderness.
Beverly Ann Teas, a Santa Fe, N.M., river guide who operates Hawk, I Am Your Sister, has been conducting such retreats since 1975. She takes women into the woods, for journal writing, trekking and solitude; runs wild rivers, and has led retreats as far away as Russia and Peru. On some of the ventures, men are also welcome.
A plain-spoken, no-nonsense woman, Teas has little use for the airy rhetoric of contemporary spirituality. She has the air of a Taoist philosopher, complete with backpack and paddle.”I’m not a spiritual leader, I’m a canoe leader. The spiritual leaders are the rivers and the sky.”said Teas, who was preparing to lead a small group of women on a 12-day canoe trip down Utah’s Green River.”We don’t go out of our way to create a spiritual reality. We don’t get artificial with this.”My whole purpose in life is to show that nature is benign and you can learn to be at home there,”she said.”All the distractions that keep you from meeting your real self are gone. And you get so tired, you’re in a world so big and so simple, none of the obstacles to awareness you normally construct are there. There’s nothing but reality.” (BEGIN SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM)
Encountering that reality opens different doors for different people. Teas says writers who join her groups are searching for a more authentic voice; spiritual seekers find that Teas’ trips come with no guarantee of enlightenment. “Rivers have no agenda. Water is not mysterious. It just goes,”she said.”It has a place; it has a home to get to and you just go with it. You don’t ever try to conquer a river; a river can’t be tamed. You might temporarily murder it with a dam, but you can’t kill it forever. And in the wilderness all you can know is living in the now. You can only deal with what’s there. It’s like Zen practice, but it’s not practice. It simply is.” (END SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM)
Beth Leonard-St. John leads women in a very different kind of retreat, incorporating massage and spiritual direction at a privately operated log-cabin hermitage in the foothills outside Denver.
A self-described”recovering Catholic,”her free-form spirituality is designed in part to heal what she sees as some of the soul-damage done by structured religion.”I was raised in what’s known as salvation theology, which is linear, authoritarian and sees things in black and white. It’s a patriarchal, codependent situation,”she said, one which”over-emphasizes the nurturing of others and under-emphasizes the nurturing of self.” In her view, self-nurturing is not a luxury, it’s a responsibility. Leonard-St. John is an advocate of”creation spirituality,”which she describes as far less structured, less punitive, more accepting of the ambiguities and contradictions of the human experience. Combining massage and spiritual direction in her two-day retreats, she says, helps integrate body and soul.”I invite a person into a place where they can start balancing out the doing and the being: Who you are, what you drive, whose wife or mother you are doesn’t matter; it can be taken away in an instant. What’s important is coming to terms with the authentic self _ the life within. Not the ego-self, but the soul-self.” Leonard-St. John is full of maxims as she guides participants in her retreats on their spiritual journeys. One of them is this:”Wake up and be, show up and do, and the rest is none of your business.””`Wake up and be’ means to wake up to consciousness: What are my beliefs, values; my source of serenity. It’s a process that doesn’t begin for most people until after age 30,”she said.”`Show up and do’ refers to the external self, the social self, how we interact every day.” And”none of your business”is shorthand for”Thy will be done.”A big fan of the Roman Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton, Leonard-St. John often invokes his famous prayer:”Lord, I don’t know if what I do pleases you. I only pray that my desire to please you pleases you.” All kinds of women are drawn to Leonard-St. John’s retreats. A recent group included a nanny, a pilot, two educators, a corporate executive and a personnel officer, all seeking to bring body and soul into closer harmony.”There are those who would like to call me a healer, but I’m not. I invite healing,”she said.”The same with retreats: It’s an invitation to be with oneself. I will be there as coach, as cheerleader and facilitator for why they are there and what they are searching for. There is an answer out there. The answer is that there is no answer. You go on retreat to celebrate that mystery.”
MJP END CONNELL
