The heartwork of love

I am delighted to invite you to join me and others for a retreat at Bonnevaux in October of this year. I’ve entitled the retreat “And the song remains beautiful” , the last line of a hauntingly lovely poem by Rilke, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. 

And we’ll probe that poem in particular at the outset of our retreat, in which a poem in which Rilke describes that in the midst of the contradictions, complexities, all of the tensions that we face in our life and in our communities and in our world, there is a song that sings its way through everything. And that song remains no matter what, and that song is beautiful. What a message, in these times.

We’ll be examining the writings of Meister Eckhart, a mystic, preacher and teacher from the late 13th and early 14th centuries, a Dominican and the visionary writings of Julian of Norwich, who lived later in that 14th century into the early 15th century. And we’ll be listening, probing, examining these remarkable visionary texts which guide us to embrace well what Rilke called ‘the heartwork of love’ and what Eckhart thought of as ‘the oneness of all life’, in the midst of all of the tensions and contradictions, all the binaries that burden us. Julian joins that same hope in speaking of the ‘oneing’ love that is our life in God. 

This will be a chance for rich conversations, both in the sessions and informally as we gather at Bonnevaux to probe that heartwork of love and the call to create in beauty. A call that goes back to Plato’s famous dialogue ‘The Symposium’. We’ll look at that briefly along the way: what is Eros? What is love but the call to create in beauty? I hope you’ll join us for this marvelous opportunity and look forward to greeting you in October, in Bonnevaux.