Horizons Fellows Retreat | Taking off our Masks

Our new cohort of Horizons Fellows had a beautiful 24 hrs at our friends’ - the Mastersons- lovely 40 acre farm just outside of Charlottesville. After a warm welcome, I gathered the Fellows for a delicious dinner (thanks, Milan Indian!) where we unpacked our summer reading book A Sacred Voice is Calling: Personal Calling and Social Conscience by John Neafsey. I’ve read quite a number of books on vocation and calling and this one has risen to the top due to its ecumenical appeal as well as its connection of calling to include concepts such as suffering & service.

After dinner, we resettled by the fire pit for s’mores and the beginning of sharing personal faith journeys. This comprised the rest of our time together as we carefully listened and held one another’s stories. There was a lot of pain and hurt but also resilience and hope. At TH, we believe the sharing of stories is a deeply sacred act and one of the most powerful ways to connect with one another. The foundation of trust and intimacy laid during our annual retreat is one that lasts for the rest of our year together.

I was so grateful 11 out of our 12 could be present and I’m just sad I forgot to get a group photo! Enjoy these images of our gorgeous spot and a river plunge after lunch.

These words by Ross Gay in The Book of Delights gets a little at the mystery of sharing our stories with one other, the sorrows that can birth joy in the sharing:

Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be, she said: ‘What if we joined our wildernesses together?’ Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.

And what if the wilderness — perhaps the densest wild in there — thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) — is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith’s term, the ‘intolerable.’ It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?

Is sorrow the true wild?

And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that?

For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.

What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.

I’m saying: What if that is joy?”