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Friends United Meeting |
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Quaker Life
June 2002
One Writer's Trail
By Peter Anderson
Several years ago, I spent over a month on a retreat in the ponderosa pines and aspens of the Henry Mountains in southern Utah. The idea was to pray, write and walk. Other days I'd walk, write and pray. Some days, just to shake things up, I'd write, pray and walk. It went like this for 35 days, until my wife Grace finally came to get me and found me waiting under a scrub oak in a driving rain.
I was singing "Wild Thing," the Jimi Hendrix version. I could hear him pounding out those chords in my mind's ear—the wail of the feedback blasting out from the wall of amps. "Wild thing, you make my heart sing." In that particular contemplative moment, it occurred to me that "Wild" was as good a word as any to describe God. "Wild thing, you make my heart sing." Here was a psalm, I imagined, with some serious voltage behind it.
Right about then, I saw our white truck coming up the road. Later, as the storm clouds broke, we cooked a steak and potato feast over a scrub oak fir, and I told Grace of my adventures and misadventures.
I'd been on enough solo trips to know what lonely was, but one particular wave of desolation that came early on during this retreat was more than a fleeting emotion. It was a much deeper sense of alienation—one that came with an undiluted awareness of all the petty bothers and anxieties that contribute to the false self Thomas Merton wrote about. The false self was not who I was in God; it was that self I had constructed with bits and pieces of personal and cultural memorabilia. Even in the Henry Mountains surrounded by hundreds of miles of God's grandest scrub, even on a retreat without distraction and with every opportunity for prayer, it was hard to let go of old conceptions. And it was hard to stay centered in God.
The good thing about the darkness is I find plenty of writers there.
Every now and then, I see a flickering fire up ahead. Maybe some old sage
like Wendell Berry would be hunkered down in the glow of the flames. I
would stop to listen and wait for a word—sometimes a word in a poem
like this one:
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know in the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
And how, as Wendell Berry's poem suggested, there was a dark way toward God and that in the darkness something would eventually bloom and sing.
What helped me break loose from this despair were some of Merton's essays I had packed along with bird and wildflower guides, and a pocket version of the Jerusalem Bible. Merton's writings became for me a kind of field guide to solitude that week. In his own spiritual ramblings through the kind of solitary terrain I now found myself struggling in, I heard reassurance.
These words helped me understand the paradox of this deep loneliness—how it might be thought of as a kind of gravitational pull—drawing me closer to the welcoming Presence in which I was living and breathing.
It is tempting in a culture that loves light to dismiss the dark way toward God as misguided, just as it is tempting in a culture that loves noise to ignore the gifts of silence. A contemplative approach to writing and prayer remains open to both.
We need guides and companions along the way. We need Kentucky farmers and poets like Wendell Berry and prolific Trappists like Thomas Merton. And we need the words of one another as well—words given and words received may just give us the courage we need to do the work that needs to be done.
Peter Anderson teaches writing at Earlham School of Religion. He also leads workshops and retreats at the Clear Creek Writing Center in Crestone, Colorado.
Copyright (c) 2002 Friends United Meeting
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