A 24 hour retreat experience
3 pm Friday, April 6 - 3:30 pm Saturday, April 7, 2012
Experience the ancient Stations of the Cross anew as we pilgrimage through the forest and sacred spaces of Rolling Ridge in a walking meditation with pauses for reflection, prayer and awareness.
In the hushed anticipation of Holy Saturday consider the deeper meaning of this interlude in the Easter story. What happened during those forgotten, sacred hours when Jesus lay in the tomb?
Led by Lindsay McLaughlin, who is a writer, contemplative dance artist and member of the residential community of Rolling Ridge Study Retreat.
This retreat is meant for those who seek a quiet, alternative preparation for Easter amid the beauty and peace of wilderness.
Fee for this retreat is $110 and includes lodging and four meals. It is possible to come for Friday Stations only for a suggested donation of $10. Retreat programming will be at Rolling Ridge Study Retreat House and surroundings.
To register, email Lindsay@rollingridge.net and send $25 deposit to RRSR, 120 Jubilee Lane, Harpers Ferry, WV 25425.
Please register by March 23, 2012.
Retreatants are welcome to arrive and settle in anytime after 12 noon on Friday. For more information email Lindsay at address above or call (304) 724-1069.
This retreat concludes by 3:30 pm on Saturday. Retreatants may leave at that time or are welcome to stay another night at no cost and meet at the Meditation Shelter at sunrise on Easter morning.
A Cooper's Hawk Easter
Since mid-autumn, after the freak October snow storm that brought down hundreds of branches and trees, the utter imperfection and messiness of the world has been etched throughout the landscape here on the wilderness preserve in which we live. I wrote about the broken trees in my Christmas letter to friends and family, "Their skeletal remains lie in odd angles, or hang awkward and broken against one another...it looks something like a war zone at the end of a battle...a rather grim image with which to enter the season of hope and joy." It's no better now. Last Saturday's fierce, bitter winds wreaked more havoc, and there is neither snow to cover the scene with white grace nor leaves to soften the edges.
On top of that, I remembered that last year near winter's end, an adolescent Cooper's hawk attacked our chickens. First it flew into the yard where Vivian keeps her flock, and then a few days later, it swooped, gracefully lethal, and fastened its talons in Jackie's beloved white hen, who was free ranging in our cottage's back lawn. It was not an easy kill. The hawk was young and the chicken not small: blood, feathers, a mangled corpse, and finally the hawk was driven off to a nearby tree, where he complained for hours concerning the injustice of our intervention. It was too late for the chicken, however.
Now Lent is waxing toward Easter. Over time, for me, the season is no longer very much about sin understood personally or about salvation from sin, though the shadowy, fear-tethered parts of myself do come into it. It's more about traveling through this wild world, where as Annie Dillard says in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, "That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation."
For more than ten years now we have held a Stations of the Cross here at Rolling Ridge. It's a pilgrimage, a walking meditation, through the quiet, budding beauty of the forest and the lovely interior spaces of the Meditation Shelter and retreat buildings. In it we consider the story of Jesus' passion amid this larger story of suffering that clearly he had come to address. Each year, for me, that journey has been both a portal to awareness and an invitation to deeper connection, to what Merton called, "what I know [and] cannot say".
Sometimes the Stations meditation has been followed by a study retreat led by Verle and Vivian Headings. In another twist of that broken world, this year the Headings have had to let that go. In the Holy Week story, what follows Jesus' death is a mysterious interlude, a hush, while Jesus lies in the tomb. It seems to me that leaping from cross to resurrection without exploring this quiet time might be missing the vital heart of the story. I propose to spend a few hours on Saturday, and with the help of poetry, thoughts from Cynthia Bourgeault, Thomas Merton, Annie Dillard and others, and with ample time for Silence and creativity, to be in this hiatus time and listen to it. I invite you to join me.
The flyer is attached here. Last year, some of us gathered at the Meditation Shelter at sunrise on Easter morning, bringing only what was in our hearts and perhaps a poem or reading. Those who come to the "Good Friday and After" experience are welcome to stay another night at the Retreat House (without cost) and join us for what I may well dub a Cooper's Hawk Easter.
Lindsay McLaughlin