1 October, 2016, Queenscliff, Australia
It’s an act of
rebellion to show up as someone trying to be whole, and as someone who believes
there is a hidden wholeness beneath the very evident brokenness of our world.
Parker Palmer
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| Aussie fish 'n chips, "flake." |
I had a wonderful three more free days
down on the peninsula with Hans before coming here to the oblate retreat. There
are a series of towns and villages on the bay side of the peninsula, some very
simple and some on the luxurious side. Hans and Ruth have kept the house near
the village of Rye that they lived in when Hans served as parish priest in
nearby Sorrento. Many of the homes in this area are holiday homes and theirs
too had the feeling of a beach house, a cross between Santa Cruz and Live Oak.
There is of course a good surfing community here, and I actually learned that
billabong is more than a brand name of surfing gear; it’s an aboriginal word
(actually two: billa=water + bang=a channel), for a stagnant
backwater pool off a river. Fr. Michael had driven me down, a long ride from
the retreat center at Warburton with lively conversation, and after lunch Hans
and I had a quiet afternoon with some errands, though he indulged me in my one
wish for dinner: for some reason I had a hankering for fish and chips, to see
how the Australian variety stacked up as compared to the English and Canadian.
Just after dark he took me to a little place called Hector’s (with a name like
that for all the world I was sure that the owners were going to be Mexicans;
they weren’t), and we had “flake,” which is actually shark. Hans thought we
would take away and eat at home, but I wanted the whole experience and
suggested that we eat in, which actually meant eating out, on a metal table on
the sidewalk right off the shore with a pretty blustery wind blowing, a scene
that Hans has recounted several times already…
I have my old tried and true prayer
service with me that I used to use on the road and which I was planning on
using for this oblate retreat, and I decided to try it out on Hans. He liked it
so much that we prayed morning and evening together from Wednesday night on, reading
the Tao te Ching and Katha Upanishad off of my iPhone. We even co-opted Ruth
into midday prayer with us before we left yesterday, that time reading from Laudato Si which Hans is reading with
great admiration. Not often that kind of treat occurs, finding someone to pray
and meditate with. In the morning on Thursday after taking the border collie,
Nelson, for a walk down at the beach on the ocean side of the peninsula (it
narrows here so that it is only a kilometer or so distance between the ocean
and the bay), Hans took me on a grand hike in the national park. We first went
one direction over some hills ‘til we spotted a herd of kangaroo. It was so
cool, there were so many of them though I wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t
pointed them out, so well camouflaged in the bush. And they were much bigger
than I would have thought and looked strong and fearsome, though they
themselves are timid. We kept walking toward them; they would stand and stare
at us for a time with their limpid eyes and then bounce bounce bounce boing
boing boing across the bush.
Then we headed the other direction, about a 5
kilometer hike through the bush and down to the shore, where we ate spinach and
cheese pasties that Hans bought at the local pasty shop, which is now owned by
a young Swedish gentleman, with whom Hans had a lively conversation. (Hans is originally
from Denmark, and by the way it’s not pronounced “Hahns” as one might expect;
the Danish is much more like “Hanns,” short flat “a.”) Later, after prayers,
Hans prepared dinner and I played guitar a bit, biding time until the rest of
the family showed up, Ruth and the two boys, Markus and Enoch. The whole mood
of the place changed, of course, not at all for the worst and it was delightful
to be around some nice domestic bliss for a few hours.
Hans had sort of co-opted the boys into
taking me for a run in the bush along the shore in the morning. I was of course
up at stupid-o’clock and Enoch too was up pretty early biding his time on the
couch, until we finally had to rouse Markus around 9 o’clock. And then we had a
great run, about 7 km., they reckoned, again through the bush along the shore,
with Enoch leading the way until the end when Markus wanted to sprint the last
bit along the street. Then after a bit of cacophonous yoga on the front porch
and a wonderful lunch of smoked trout and hummus on thick toast, one of our
other oblates, Joe, fetched us and we headed over here to Queenscliff. To get
here be car would have taken a few hours, all around the bay and through
Melbourne again, so we, of course, took the fairy, a huge boat that held about
thirty cars. It was only a 45-minute cruise, but it was beautiful to see the
shoreline and then the mouth that leads out to the ocean and the little village
of Queenscliff as we approached. It is a lovely spot, with Victorian era homes,
churches and public buildings. This area is one of the first places settled by
the British, and it is from nearby that the first shots were fired in both the
World War I and World War II, cannon fire across the bow aimed at German
tankers who were trying to escape in the former case, and the same who were unaware
that war had been declared in the latter.
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| Sr. Nola at the Santa Casa. |
The retreat center, Santa Casa, is run
by the Mercy Sisters, the same congregation that runs so many retreat centers
in the States. Or, I should say, is run by one sole Mercy sister, Nola, and she
does a great job. The place is very clean, quiet and well appointed. The main
building, where most of us are housed, too is from the Victorian era, and there
is another more modern building where we are gathering for our conferences and
prayers. This gathering feels a bit different from the oblate retreat on Tasmania
in 2009, a few less people and not all of them are oblates (14) but “observers”
(6), nonetheless very invested and attentive. I had a lively discussion with
several of the folks last night during and after dinner, one of them now a yoga
teacher and iconographer (great
combination) that I had met back in 2009 and with whom I had stayed in touch
sporadically all these years. The guys I spoke with at least seem to be as very
well read as Michael and Hans, and I found myself discussing Panikkar and
Abhishiktananda with no real gaps to fill in.
Monday, October 3, Church of St. Mary of
the Angels, Bukit Batok, Singapore
It was so interesting to step out of the
airport and smell the air here in Singapore again. I transited through here so
many times between 2006 and 2013, usually on my way to and from India, that it
began to feel like a second home. I got in so late that I had to stay the night
at Leonard’s last night, my old friend from here who again fetched me from the
airport. He had set up a separate en
suite room for me in the apartment and I slept very well ‘til about 5 when a
massive thunderstorm blew through. It rains here all the time, like nearly
every day, but I don’t ever remember experiencing thunder and lightning like
that, and it caused me to have one of those odd travel moments where I couldn’t
figure out where the heck I was, but I woke up thinking that I was on the
uppermost floor of a high rise somewhere in Asia. (The apartment building is
only seven or eight stories and we were on the fifth.) The rest of the morning
couldn’t have been nicer: I got to use the gym at the apartment complex, then
Leonard arranged for me to have a massage of sorts––their favorite Chinese body
worker, Helen, does a unique combination of acupressure and massage––right
there in the living room. And then I accomplished another of my goals, getting
a new pair of glasses here in Singapore where there is a wide selection of one-off
frames and they are less expensive than in the states. Now I am firmly
ensconced at the friary at the Church of St. Mary of the Angels. I have stayed
here many times, but usually in the parish house instead of the friary. It is
very comfortable here and I shall enjoy celebrating part of the Transitus with them tonight and
tomorrow.
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| Our oblates Down Under; Fr. Michael is to my left; Hans is three down from him. |
The retreat in Australia ended very
well. This is about the fourth time now I have offered a retreat on this
particular theme, drawn from Bruno’s Second
Simplicity––the quaternitas of
the Silence, the Word, the Music and the Dance––but filled in with my own
material. Just as in almost every retreat conference he gave Bruno used to
always walk and draw a cross with a circle around it, a mandala, and then fill
it in, so I have been introducing these talks by saying it’s as if he left me a
blank mandala and encouraged me to fill it in in my own way, and I have. I hope
he would approve. It has been interesting reading Panikkar’s Rhythm of Being simultaneously, in which
he is trying to show the universality of the trinity or the triune relationship
of Ultimate Reality not just in Christianity but also as it is manifested in
many traditions” India, Egypt, the Buddha, Lao Tzu’s heaven, human and earth,
ancient Rome, through the Christian writers. Actually he is extending the
“privilege of the Trinity to the whole of Reality… The Trinity is not [just]
the privilge of the Godhead but the character of reality as a whole.” I have
been marking in the margins “the 4th” every time I see him pointing
out Bruno’s other movement, the Dance, which is in some way included in
Panikkar’s relationship already too. He does mention Jung once in relationship
to this: “One might also refer to the hypothesis of the archetypes as C. G.
Jung interprets them” who “tended to see the human psyche as a quarternitas because of its apparent
balance.” Arcane nonsense, I know, but I love being at least in the shallow end
of that particular pool, of this intellectual spiritual legacy, and our oblates
Down Under sure appreciated my forays into it all.
At the last session of the retreat
Sunday morning I offered my own reflections and a ferverino on the possibilities for our oblate program, how I see
the oblates as the outer face of our charism, and how other religious
congregations are passing on their charism to lay people and how this ties in
with Fr. Bede’s vision of loose knit gatherings of lay communities (one of the
main inspirations for the World Community of Christian Meditation, by the way).
I told them too about our oblate mentoring program and how important it is to
feel part of the larger congregation and our storied history. I also encouraged
them to think outside the box, to stay content to be charismatic and outside
the institution and traditional religious life, that that is where I see the real
excitement happening.
Last night flying and this morning I was
really feeling the beginning of the transition back to California. I think I
will be ready come next Monday to empty out my backpack and sleep in my own bed
again. It’s all very mysterious, the unfolding of life and our vocation, and to
see the world again from these various perspectives and discern our individual
and collective place in it. I feel more than ever the bond between us all, the
common ground that we already share and how small the global village has
become––and how symbiotic as well! I find it exhilarating and sobering at the
same time. As Parker Plamer says, sometimes it's an act of rebellion just to believe that "there is a hidden wholeness beneath the very evident brokenness of our world."
