Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,

Tomorrow, September 8th we begin a four week journey for Resistance, Renewal, and Resilience: Resting into Uncertainty and Harnessing Opportunity with Kindred Spirits led by Wisdom Council members Aisling Richmond, Felicia Murrell, Jamie Marich, and Richard Bruxvoort Colligan. This retreat will guide you through contemplative and action-based practices to meet the challenging times in which we live. 

Felicia Murrell offers this reflection.

As a descendant of enslaved humans in America, I embody resistance, resilience and renewal. These energies live within me, blood memory genetically coded in my DNA, alive in every cell. I’ve been asking Sacred Presence to show me what it looks like to move toward transformation and fully participate in life and social justice issues from a posture of awareness and openness. How can I stand resolute against systems that cause harm while holding empathy for all humanity, even for those who do wrong? The challenge is to not confuse a person’s actions with their ontology and to avoid mirroring the hate and disregard for human dignity that I oppose.

What is it to join with Love and my ancestors in the eternal work of renewal? Renewal as mutual care for our shared home, and love of neighbors and creation as an answer to “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” What keeps me resilient, grounded in beauty, truth and goodness?

To be resilient is to be rooted in community and open to Light. In the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn, “We cultivate resilience through ongoing practice. It’s a way of living and living well with what life offers us.” 

In my body, resistance feels the opposite of living well. Tight like a clenched fist, it’s an armored, defensive state, hypervigilant to harm. As Eckhart Tolle notes, this kind of resistance is an “inner contraction, a hardening of the shell of the ego.” Taking action from this place of negativity only creates more external resistance. It closes the shutters and blocks the light. Audre Lorde’s wisdom echoes this: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Fighting with the same energy of blame, judgment, and division will never bring renewal. 

To navigate the tension between resistance and open awareness, I offer for consideration the practice of lament. Lament is a powerful container for our resistance, one that allows us to be with reality as it is without shutting down the flow of Love. Lament is the courageous act of bringing our full attention to the complexity of our world—to sit with pain and name it. Lament provides an opportunity to stare the monster of injustice in the face and call it what it is. It demands an authentic encounter with truth, an accurate telling of history, and an acknowledgment of suffering. Lament is the act of letting our hearts break while setting aside cheap platitudes.

Lament takes us into another’s pain, as a bridge to empathy, where resistance sometimes falls short. It creates a sacred space for both protest and grief, transforming our pain into a profound act of resiliency.

Lament doesn’t come with the assurance or announcement of hope, only hope-filled yearning — the seedbed of resiliency. Resiliency is the work that happens in the dark, in the liminal space between life as it is and life as we hope it might be. Like seeds buried in the earth, we wait with expectancy, trusting these seeds of hope will take root and germinate. Though we cannot know the outcome with any degree of certainty, we know there is no renewal without burial. The two are intricately linked.

In New Orleans, Louisiana (USA), jazz musicians embody this paradox. Funeral processions begin with the “first line,” a slow, mournful dirge—a lament for what has been lost. But after the burial, the music erupts into the “second line,” a joyous revelry for their loved one’s transition into the ancestral realm. The whole of both parts are necessary for renewal.

The hope of lament is that the mournful sounds of heartache, of injustice, will penetrate our numbness. And in a sea of awakened hearts, amid the dance of life and the merriment of our kinship, all will experience renewal.

Close your eyes.
Imagine what is true and beautiful in our world.
Take a full, deep breath
and imagine once more.

 If the only way forward is toward, what are we moving closer to? I hope the answer is each other. And I hope you’ll consider joining our band of kindred spirits as we explore these themes: resistance, resilience and renewal while resting into uncertainty and harnessing opportunity.

Many thanks to Felicia for her powerful reflection. If you are feeling overwhelmed in these times, this retreat-style program may be the fit for you. Our exploration begins September 8th.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE

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