Radiating Paradise
An impromptu trip to a monastery
I went on a one-day monastery retreat a week ago. It was almost too moving to write about, but here I go. ;-)
Last week was a rough time. I needed to get out. It felt like I was in a small, cramped basement with one ground-level window. The window offered very little light because a monsoon raged outside, and flood waters lapped halfway up the glass.
What does one do when the flood waters rise? One gets to high ground. For me - that usually means getting out into the woods, but I’d been hearing about the St. Iakovos monastery for awhile, (“oddly,” it just “kept coming up”), so I called to see if they offered retreats. It just so happened that Abbess Aemiliane from the Sacred Monastery of St. Nina’s in Maryland was visiting that very weekend. They quickly threw together a retreat around it.
I had planned to go myself. It was approaching an emergency situation. Pressure from all sides practically squeezed me out of the usual work-home-work-home routine, but I couldn’t just take one of my precious few days off to do something for myself, right? The kids are starting to forget what I look like, and I knew my wife would deeply resent it.
So, I split the difference and asked if my wife would like to come with me. In what can only be described as a marital miracle, she was able to rearrange her schedule in just one day’s time (instead of the usual three months advance notice), and she came with me. (She did, however, teach some classes to international students on the drive down. What a time to be alive…)
I had something I needed to talk to my wife about, and it wasn’t going to be fun. I had a stick and I was going to draw a line in the sand with it. There was a 100% chance that line would become a canyon. But before I split the earth between us, I wanted to pray.
By the end of that one-day retreat - only six hours, really - I round-filed that thought from the three-point line. As trite as it sounds, “everything had changed.”
Thank God. I mean that too my core.
Somehow, in that short time-span of the retreat, the little abbess from Maryland, (and a monk with her, Fr. Dionysius, who I know even less about), spoke truth in the way that leaves no distance between hearing, understanding, and application. It wasn’t wrapped up in a system. It wasn’t “one weird trick.” It was just truth, and it landed hard.
I have pages of notes, but when I try to expand on them, I corrupt the message. So, as simply as I can, I’ll just say this:
Surrender.
Watch your words.
Withhold judgement.
Forgive.
This was it. Words that we who believe have heard our entire lives. Words we agree with but struggle to actually live.
I’ve often thought that growing up Christian, in any form, is probably a major disadvantage to the Walk. When you grow up hearing the truth, you agree with it and assume that you’re living it long before life truly puts your beliefs to the test. The result is a bunch of self-righteous, preachy know-it-alls who cause more scandal than anything else. They don’t, as the abbess put it, “radiate Paradise.”
I know I certainly haven’t.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that my wife and I have been struggling for a long time. That’s how this little project began - trying to unravel the unraveling of my marriage, or so it seemed. (I thought it was about my career. “Haha.”) And our struggles have been a real scandal to me: how could two people who have sought God all their lives savage each other like we have? How could we hear the words of 1 Corinthians 13:4 and then hold each others faults and failures before each others’ faces on a daily basis? Is the “grace of marriage” just marketing BS? If God won’t save a marriage of people crying out to Him, then what exactly is He doing here?
But here’s the thing: during a break halfway through this retreat, my wife and I went for a walk on the grounds. We went down to this big dock on the pond. She got down on her knees and then prostrated herself before me, forehead to the ground.
“Forgive me, the sinner,” she said.
In shock, I awkwardly followed suit and did the same. Then we rose and embraced, saying together, “God forgives and I forgive.”
If this sounds wildly dramatic or just flat-out strange, it’s an Orthodox thing. The week before, on Sunday, we celebrated Forgiveness Vespers. At the end of that service, which marks the beginning of Lent for us, the entire parish performs that exact gesture to each and every other member of the parish. Old men prostrate before toddlers, asking for forgiveness. People who have never spoken to each other ask for and offer forgiveness. Men and women who nobody blames for anything ask for forgiveness. Children, who are pretty much incapable of committing sins ask for forgiveness.
It’s a humbling, often heart-breaking, soul-emptying (and filling) evening. (I admit - when it came time for me and my wife to forgive each other, with a whole load of grievances in tow, both real and imagined, we were both suddenly hit by “allergies.”)
It didn’t last long, though. We were probably reviewing our grievance lists by the time we drove home. I think about it now and feel shame, of course, but also bewilderment. How does that happen? What’s wrong with us?
A week later, Abbess Aemiliane began her first talk with the words, “What else do I need? Everything is here. The people whose prayers sustain me and save my life every day are here.”
And soon after: “What we attend to grows. If we attend to the weeds, they grow, get thorns, and then trap us…”
Immediate conviction. For both of us.
A week later, we’re still prostrating to each other and asking for - and extending - forgiveness. I don’t even want to dwell on anything else - the larger Meaning behind it, how to package it and preach it to others, nothing. It just is.
It’s so good, in fact, that my wife and I have engaged in a little project that I won’t discuss now, or perhaps ever, but it’s an attempt to reorder everything around the simple, true, good and beautiful. It’s literally about purifying our hearts, and it’s already produced more good than I thought was possible.
I’ve been coming to realize something in the last few years regarding our work to dig out of the crater of the end of my business. I’ve been focusing on building skills, overcoming insecurities, fostering a well-ordered mindset. The amount and quality of “personal improvement” content I’ve “consumed” is embarrassing, frankly. What I’ve realized is that to “rise above” and succeed, one has to get some very basic, very fundamental things in order first. Nothing else “works” without it. Not my career, not my side hustles, nothing. Literally nothing matters more than this:
Surrender to the One who made you.
Watch your words - whether they come from your mouth or just fester in your mind.
Don’t judge - everyone is in this battle just like you.
Forgive. Forgive, forgive, forgive.
It was remarkable how she spoke simple truth, and yet it was PIERCING.
This made me cry. I'm just so glad for you. Thank you for sharing this.