Silent Retreat

The theme of this weekend's silent retreat was "The Wilderness Journey". Throughout the day there were specific group meditations around Matthew 4:1-11 and Jesus' journey in the wilderness which serendipitously intersected with my personal readings during the retreat.

For the past couple of years I have been slowly making my way through "The Gift of Pain" a memoir by Paul Brand. I decided that a day of silence in the beautiful seaside town of Bolinas was the perfect opportunity to finish the book! Dr. Brand spent his life working with leprosy patients around the world. The essence of his book is that a life without pain is actually a terrible life. He said, "If I held in my hands the power to eliminate physical pain from the world I would not exercise it. My work with pain deprived patients has prove to me that pain protects us from destroying ourselves."

'If I were to choose between pain and nothing, I would choose pain.' ~William Faulkner

When it comes to our lives, I find that "pain and pleasure come to us not as opposites but as twins, strangely joined." Everywhere greater joy is proceeded by greater suffering. "We dare not allow our daily lives to become so comfortable that we no longer challenged to grow, seek adventure, to risk." In a society that works endlessly to reduce and eliminate pain, the 'wilderness' is an essential part of our spiritual life. The wilderness for all of us is a life changing, spiritual experience; like Jesus, at the end we are free from distractions, from those addictions we use to dull or negate our pain our discomfort. Its an opportunity to learn self-restraint, to gain trust, and clarity. Anyone who wants to follow Christ, needs the clarity that only comes from the gifts of the wilderness. Emerging from the wilderness, we learn to employ those spiritual disciplines throughout our daily lives -- to live on less, to practice a life of subtraction and not addition. Lent is an annual opportunity to walk through the wilderness. 40 days to remember what life is like without the usual painkillers, the chocolate, the white carbs, the cussing, the over active social calendar, and to deal with our spiritual insufficiency.

So this lent season I'm walking through my own wilderness to embrace those painful, awkward places in my life. What will you learn in the wilderness?

"Happy are they who bear their share of the worlds pain: In the long run they will know more happiness than those who avoid it." ~Jesus