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October 24, 2007
Contributing author, James Finley
I am writing this on my flight home from a week at the Findhorn community in Scotland. I arrived at Findlhorn during Carolyn's Myss's retreat on Saint Teresa of Ávila. Then I stayed on to lead a retreat on the mystical teachings of Teresa's close friend and fellow mystic Saint John of the Cross. I met so many wonderful people there, and was so taken by the spirituality of the place that it will take me a while to absorb the richness of the experience. Here, however, I want to share with you an impression that is fresh and clear within me. The impression has to do with the fact that the manner in which the Findhorn community came into existence is so consistent with how new spiritual movements tend to begin.
The Findhorn community has its origins in a man named Peter Caddy getting fired from his job as manager of a hotel in central Scotland in 1962. With no job and no place to stay, he and wife Eileen towed their caravan trailer to a hollow by a rubbish dump at Findhorn Bay in Northern Scotland. By that time, Eileen was already on a spiritual path of daily meditation, which grew deeper and more profound during those days she and her husband and their children lived in that small trailer by the sea. Soon other like-minded people began to join them. By 1970, fifty-one people were living at Findhorn. And to this day Findhorn continues to be a growing and vibrant community of men and women, seeking to live close to the land and open to the spirit's guidance.
While at Findhorn I visited a nearby monastery, Pluscarden Abbey, that was founded in 1230. Sitting in that ancient church, listening to the monks chant Vespers was moving to me because it so reminded me of the years I lived as a monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Listening to the monks chant Vespers, it dawned on me that the monastery has origins similar to that of Findhorn. For the Abbey historically traces its roots back to Saint Benedict, who, in the fifth century, did something very similar to what Eileen and Peter Caddy did at Findhorn. Benedict went to a remote area in Italy where he surrendered himself to God's will in a simple life of meditation and prayer. Word got out that he was there. And soon he was joined by a like-minded seeker, then another and another, and another; eventually becoming the spiritual movement of Benedictine monasticism that played a crucial role in the culture and spiritual heritage of medieval Europe, and which continues to nurture and inspire people to this day.
It seems then that whether we are talking about Saint Benedict in the fifth century, Saint Teresa and John of the Cross in the sixteenth century, or mother Teresa of Calcutta in our own day, we see the same pattern in which the divine mystery appears in the humble origins of someone's surrender to God in love and silence. Nor is this pattern limited to large-scale social settings, but is rather the pattern that gently guides the course of our own lives. As we travel through life, we see how true it is that painful experiences often prove to be the staging area of unforeseeable blessings. What seems at the time to be an impenetrable barrier mysteriously dissolves in the willingness to sit, wait, listen, and hope in God's infinite power to empower us to do things we did not know we could do.
Of course, it is tempting to become discouraged in difficult times. But when we take in the big picture, we see that being discouraged is also short-sighted. Taking in the big picture helps us to see how naïve it is ever to doubt that our present difficulties, no matter what they might be, are anything other than the first stirrings of God's next big surprise. This holds true even when the situation, by human standards, may not turn out as we might hope.
The key to getting through difficult times is to take to heart the lesson offered by all the mystics down through the ages. For the mystics remind us we cannot be truly effective in dealing with life's difficulties, unless we ground ourselves in silent meditation and prayer. For in the receptive stillness of meditation and prayer we discern the still small voice that guides us through the night. As we listen intently to all that is going on within us, we can begin to sense the blessings that are already present in the apparent loss and hardship we may be going through at the moment. Surely, this is deathbed wisdom. For, as our faith assures, the moment of death is not simply the end. Death is a door that opens out upon new and unforeseeable beginnings that never end. Learning to see this gain out of loss, this birth out of death rhythm; learning to step into the stream of this rhythm, to move with it, and trust in it always, is to live a contemplative way of life in the midst of the world.
Visit Jim Finley's website at: contemplativeway.org
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Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
—Jelaluddin Rumi
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