We are very grateful for our day-long retreat with Fr Laurence Freeman, OSB on 20 July: Laying Down the Burden of Hate—Spiritual Practices for our Day.
Fr Laurence came back to Minnesota for the first time in eleven years, to address twenty-five ecumenical Christian congregations collaborating in our Lilly Endowment funded Initiative for Contemplative Discipleship. In planning for the day, we were delighted but concerned. This was the middle of an always-too-short Minnesota summer: would people give up this summer Saturday, one of their few chances to be outside— “at the lake” or just somewhere soaking up the sun?
In the end, just under 200 people attended the retreat, making it the largest event in our now four-year-long initiative. For the title of our day, we had borrowed words from Fr Laurence’s February 2022 talk on “Meditation and War” given just days before Russia invaded Ukraine. He used Black American Congressman John Lewis’s words that day to underline that meditation is most important in times of war: “We must find a way to lay down the burden of hate, for hate is too heavy a burden to bear.” Person after person said it was those words that led them to register for the retreat. It is a fearful time in our “Twin Cities” of Minneapolis and St. Paul (we were meeting barely five miles from where a white Minneapolis police officer had murdered black man George Floyd four years prior to the retreat), in our country with our many divisions, in our world, and in our hearts. We needed this day together.
And what a day we had! We began in silence—and then Fr Laurence spoke to us about the givenness of love that we can only touch in meditation, in silence. “We need conversation to address war and its causes,” he said. “But first we need the silence that naturally opens outward into ‘conversation in the Spirit.’”
Two Minneapolis-based African American contemplative practice leaders in our initiative took the podium. Rev. Dr Janet Johnson and Rev. Dedra Herron-Slack spoke to us of Rest as Resistance: Sabbath Keeping as Spiritual Practice. They described a “legacy of exhaustion” in our society—a shared legacy, to be sure, but one imposed for centuries by white men upon so many African American people. They encouraged us to rest. And then Fr Laurence shared the vision at the heart of Christian mantra meditation—a vision of us as beings of incomparable depth, with Spirit revealing love as our core identity and central desire. And he brought us into thirty minutes of shared silent meditation, the most powerful minutes of our day.
The retreat ended with Rev. Herron-Slack leading us in prayer: God, free us from resentment and envy as we bear witness to the prophets, our guides into deeper freedom. Help us never get used to being used. We were made for more. For together we possess the mysterious power of regeneration wrapped up in our bones. May it be so. A sense of ourselves as a community of love was palpable as we went out from our day together. Thank you, Fr Laurence, Leo, and all at WCCM. You helped renew us; you connected us to your world community; and you energized us for another year of “contemplative discipleship” together—another year of what you and Pope Francis call “conversation in the Spirit.”
