Walk through the world with care, my love
And sing the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you stumble through machair* sands eroding
Let the fern unfurl your grieving, let the heron still your breathing…From “The Lost Words Blessing” in Spell Songs
Once upon a time, GilChrist was a hay field.
Once upon a time before that, GilChrist was a forest.
Once upon a time before that, GilChrist was a glacier.
So many particulars of history fall through the cracks of human memory, but the land remembers, calls by name the many ancestors whose feet have touched this ground. We are in their debt. We are guests of their kin. We are the ones who walk here now, whose names are known.
This October, we are 30 years into the experiment that is GilChrist Retreat Center. GilChrist was born not from a business plan, but from intuition, from conversation, from the heart’s longing and deep faith and hard labor.
Flipping through photos of the early years with both this anniversary and this cultural moment in mind, an early image of the hay fields held my attention. At first glance, there are two distinct sides to the landscape, but underneath that initial impression is the reality that the whole field is made of the same stuff. I can’t help but think of this image as a metaphor for all the things we humans tend to take apart that were never meant to be separate: human and non-human, “us” and “them,” the inner work of contemplation and the outer work of action…the list could go on.
As a retreat center in the rolling hills with limited access to technology, GilChrist is surely a place to get “away.” But as one of our inspirations Thomas Merton cautioned, “If you go into the desert merely to get away from people you dislike, you will find neither peace nor solitude; you will only isolate yourself with a tribe of devils.” As I understand it, that “tribe” includes the parts of myself I’d rather distance myself from, trapped inside the gateless walls that are designed to shut out anything that doesn’t suit my story.
GilChrist and many other retreat centers around the world are places to tear down those walls and grow the room inside ourselves—for discomfort, for difference, for paradox, for peace that doesn’t hinge on the news cycle and joy so deep it bubbles over in spite of all the facts. It is a place to name what we’re looking for, and to remember that we never forgot where and how to find it.
As false dichotomies stretch us toward the breaking point and as information overlords overload us with fuzzy data and fake needs, consider returning—in memory or in body—to a place that has held you before. To me, that is one of the best ways to celebrate anything worth celebrating in this moment. As the “Lost Words Blessing” concludes,
Even as the hour grows bleaker, be the singer and the speaker
And in city and in forest, let the larks become your chorus
And when every hope is gone, let the raven call you home…
May it be so.
By Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma
* A Gaelic word meaning “fertile plain”
