September 25, 2024
This past Monday, during a break in my clinical schedule at the Cathedral Counseling Center, and in need of some restorative time, I walked outside the front door of the Lanier House and entered the outdoor labyrinth. I walk past it every morning when I arrive at the counseling center, and every evening as I leave for my car and the return trip to Jasper. But I don’t often take the time to walk the labyrinth, an ancient Celtic spiritual practice.
Walking the labyrinth at the Cathedral, similar to the one at Holy Family and those around the world, is a contemplative spiritual discipline. It involves prayerfully walking a marked path based on the ancient practice of pilgrimage. On a pilgrimage, a pilgrim intentionally leaves their ordinary world, journeying away from the distractions and busyness of life. Labyrinths can be used for meditation, prayer, and contemplation, or as a physical expression of a person’s spiritual journey, and are often used as a way to quiet the mind and calm anxiety. They can be used to worship and praise God, or to intercede for others. Walking the labyrinth can help persons enhance their creativity, and integrate body, mind, and spirit toward “wholeness” (or “integritas.”)
The labyrinth is one among many spiritual disciplines available to us on our journey and can be included in a Rule of Life. For many years I served as psychological health faculty for Episcopal CREDO, a wellness program for clergy designed to provide a restorative and healing experience away from the quotidian day to day life of a priest or deacon.
September 18, 2024
River Sojourns-Life Journeys – Bill Harkins
One of the enduring joys of my youth has been a fondness for rivers, lakes, and streams. Growing up, I especially enjoyed whitewater canoeing and kayaking, and the wild places to which these activities took me. In our beautiful Southern Appalachians, with an abundance of water resources, I felt at home on the Amicalola and the Chestatee, the Chattahoochee, and the Nantahala. In more recent years, I discovered sea kayaking, and I’ve been fortunate to paddle in places as diverse and magical as coastal Maine, Southeast Alaska, and the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. It is a delight to view the world from the perspective of the water.
One notices the intricacy and beauty of creation in new and remarkable ways. One is for a time both in—and of—the context of the water. The Japanese poet Basho knew this experience well:
The old pond, ah!
A frog jumps in:
The water’s sound!
Like the ripples of my paddle as I navigate the current of the Cartecay, the frog’s presence both disrupts the smooth texture of the world and belongs to it. Yet, in some ways we are different, Basho’s frog and I. We humans cannot fully immerse ourselves in the river world around us. We cannot escape our estrangement in the world, as the theologians Kierkegaard, Tillich, and others have expressed so well. We are wholly in the world, but reflectively so.
September 11, 2024
We paused on the trail—tired, hot, and momentarily liberated from the weight of our heavy packs—and I sat down on a scorched, fallen log, grateful for the respite, in what only three years earlier had been a verdant, old growth Montana forest. Now, the charred remains of spruce, lodge-pole pine, and fir were all that I could see. Burned sentinels of formerly majestic trees rose ahead and above us, and those no longer standing seemed to litter the forest floor as if some great force had arbitrarily tossed them and let them lay where they fell. Chaos and destruction seemed all around. I found myself feeling sad, and lamenting the loss of what I knew had once been a fecund, flourishing forest ecosystem.
I was in the Scapegoat Wilderness area of Montana with dear friends from graduate school, an annual, much-anticipated sojourn, and this was not what I had in mind when I flew into Great Falls a few days before. I’d had visions of escaping my native southern heat by hiking in cool, pristine sub-alpine forests, and I now found myself in a forest radically changed by fire; ravaged, and permanently damaged. Or was it? Was I seeing the whole picture?
Several days prior to our Montana hike, we converged on Great Falls, Montana, where Scott, the younger brother of one of our cohort, lives and owns a small cabin in the Bob Marshall Wilderness area, about 40 miles east of Augusta, Montana. We planned to spend 5-6 days backpacking in what is affectionately called “the Bob,” some of the most magnificent wilderness in the country.
September 4, 2024
This month we observe the Feast Days of two remarkable women, Hildegard and Phoebe. Hildegard of Bingen, born in 1098 in the lush Rhineland Valley, was a mystic, poet, composer, dramatist, doctor, and scientist. Her parents’ tenth child, she was tithed to the Church and raised by the anchoress Jutta in a cottage near the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. Drawn by the life of silence and prayer, other women joined them, finding the freedom, rare outside women’s religious communities, to develop their intellectual gifts. They organized as a convent under the authority of the abbot of Disibodenberg, with Jutta as abbess. When Jutta died, Hildegard, then 38, became abbess. Later she founded independent convents at Bingen (1150) and Eibingen (1165), with the Archbishop of Mainz as her only superior. From childhood, Hildegard experienced dazzling spiritual visions.
We are told that at age 43, a voice commanded her to tell what she saw. So began an outpouring of extraordinarily original writings illustrated by unusual and wondrous illuminations. These works abound with feminine imagery for God and God’s creative activity. In 1147, Bernard of Clairvaux recommended her first book of visions, Scivias, to Pope Eugenius III, leading to papal authentication at the Synod of Trier. Hildegard became famous, eagerly sought for counsel, a correspondent of kings and queens, abbots and abbesses, archbishops and popes. She carried out four preaching missions in northern Europe, unprecedented activity for a woman. She practiced medicine, focusing on women’s needs; published treatises on natural science and philosophy;