Daily Episcopalian

By Donald Schell

Sometimes a tradition begins by accident. I was thirty-five years old, and eighteen months into founding our new congregation, and I invited congregants to a weekend silent retreat I’d hoped to launch a practice of silent retreats in my new congregation. The Spirit had something else in mind.

Someone had suggested we go to a retreat house tended by a vowed Episcopal hermit, Maggie Ross. Sister Maggie’s retreat house was deep in redwood forest north of the Russian River. She lived in a cottage some distance from the house where we’d be staying. We’d have to cook for ourselves - with propane, like the lights, because the house was off the grid. It sounded perfect.

I told our congregation of twenty somethings about my previous experience with silence in community and common prayer in a setting of silence. I said we’d be roughing it a bit and that we’d get to meet a hermit who had a pet raven, but she wouldn’t talk with us because she was a hermit and we’d be in silence. I may have mentioned that Maggie Ross was a writer, but it was the year before she published The Fire of Your Life, so all I knew of her writing was that it was part of her daily practice as a vowed solitary.

It so happened that a few months before the retreat we’d started a congregational writers’ group. We did writing exercises in the group and shared what we were working on, whether fiction, poetry, memoir, or essay writing. As we packed up our food and gear to drive up to Cazadero together, I noticed that everyone coming on the retreat was part of our congregation’s writers’ group. When we gathered after our first long silence on Saturday evening, everyone had journals and notes, prayers, poems and reflections from the day’s silence. We read and listened in wonder. We’d mostly used the writing to get to a place of deeper truthfulness. I think that was Sister Maggie’s observation. Watching us during the day in the embracing quiet of the redwood forest, she’d decided to break her usual pattern and sit down with the weekend group.

As it turned out, our shared prayers that weekend were very simple – sung grace at meals and a quiet Eucharist one evening. By the end of the weekend we knew we’d begun something we wanted to continue. What had been planned as a silent prayer retreat had become a writers’ retreat, a weekend of luminous silence for creativity. We scheduled with Maggie to return the next year and planned how to invite other writing friends.

In time Maggie left the country to live her hermit’s life the edge of a regular monastic community, and we moved our annual weekend to St. Dorothy’s Rest, a retreat center that offered us the additional support of a cook who prepared our meals. Gradually other artists joined us – composers, a dancer, painters, a potter-sculptor, photographers, and an iconographer. We’ve gathered every Labor Day since 1982, continuing to fold new participants in to the group. Sometime in the early 1990’s we added a second weekend in the spring. The group grew to twenty-five or thirty people. We continued to welcome beginners and professionals, people bringing work in progress or people wanting to try something. We asked everyone to declare on the first night of the retreat what he or she’d be working on. To encourage people to explore creative practice outside the safety of their familiar medium and spark something new, a composer might offer a music composition workshop or musical improvisation workshop for writers and painters, or an actor would lead a couple hours of expressive movement work. In such offerings, writers regularly found quirky, inspiring, provocative invitations to write.

When we opened the retreat to writers and artists beyond our parish community, we had to define ourselves and how we were gathered. If we were no longer a church group of artists and writers, what would we be? Our core group of planners decided we could welcome all kinds of artists and writers so long as we made clear that some of the work presented might be Christian or explicitly spiritual, and that prayer at meals and a Eucharist open to all would be part of our gathering.

Welcoming artists and writers who weren’t Christian stretched our own openness to hear experience and imagination shaped by those artists’ visions and hopes. We came to recognize how essential the Spirit was to all creativity, but we didn’t worry whether our non-Christian participants welcomed that language to describe what we experienced together (though many did). Sr. Maggie’s wisdom confirmed our ongoing discovery that even when experience is truthfully told, what we personally believe, and what the church teaches are in a dynamic tension. The Spirit is present in that tension challenging, enlarging, and re-defining us and our faith.

Over the decades, this gathering helped shape the spirituality of our congregation.
- We learned that anyone can be creative.
- We learned that the desire that moves us to create is never satisfied
- We learned that faithfulness to vision for a work may carry an artist through passionate trial-and-error, and into frustration and failure on the way to realizing the vision.
- We learned that faithful desire makes people patient with suffering and fires that patience with hope.
- We learned that creativity CAN be shared before work is done if a welcoming, encouraging community is willing to see or hear another’s unfinished work and say “I wonder…”
- We learned to respect and listen to the artist’s vision as we shared experience of new work, and that made us readier to collaborate with anyone taking a new initiative in the congregation.

Two years after we started the retreats, a painter attended our St. Gregory’s Sunday liturgy for the first time. She told me she kept coming back to St. Gregory’s because it was the first time she’d felt like an ordinary, normal person in church. She felt welcomed as an artist: we had learned something of the essential humanity of creative work.

Later, when people visiting St. Gregory’s began saying they were amazed at how many artists and creative people we’d attracted to the congregation, I responded that the congregation had helped many of those artists and creative people emerge. Some visitors couldn’t believe that this many creative people hadn’t walked into church as artists. But even skeptics, if they stayed, learned startling things about their own God-given creativity. All kinds of other creative and collaborative projects sprang up in the church’s life. We learned to gather around vision and help people articulate it. Sometimes we found ourselves growing into the discipline of moving gracefully from a leadership role in one project to a supporting, following role in another project. We found that creative practice, like contemplation, moves us again and again to say, ‘Thank you.’ We glimpsed why our Great Thanksgiving is our response to God’s creative gift of God’s own presence to us in the flesh, Jesus.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is
President of All Saints Company.

Comments (14)

Thanks for this beautiful reflection, Donald! You've affirmed in words what I've felt deeply for such a long time through music: creative artistry, no matter where it is found, is a manifestation of the Spirit at work.

Thank you for the witness of cultivating a community that reflects this so profoundly!

Posted by The Rev. Richard E. Helmer | May 14, 2010 10:19 AM

What a beautiful story and such a vital ministry. I attended a church in my 20s that did regular silent retreats and have missed them sorely since moving away from DC, where the church was. Now I am a writer. I can see how well the disciplines of writing and silent retreat could come together beautifully. And to have the benefit of other artists right there, sharing their work--sounds like heaven on earth. Too bad I live on the opposite coast, or I'd say, "Where do I sign up?!"

Posted by Ellen Dollar | May 14, 2010 10:20 AM

Oh this brings back the many wonderful weekends I had at the Artist's Retreat. I have said this many times within the SGN community, but it's worth saying again; St. Gregory's provided a place where I could feel utterly normal, ordinary and regular while being a practicing artist. I didn't have to waste energy defending my need to paint, or whether or not I was a "real' artist. I felt mainstreamed, just folded into things, and that was essential for me. It removed an unnecessary struggle from my life. And , as I found out later when I did several residencies, it was like a mini-residency. Someone else cooked and cleaned and all you had to do was your work. Wonderful.

Posted by Olivia Kuser | May 14, 2010 11:26 AM

Richard,

Thanks for encouraging words. Looking back it's clear to me that recognizing the Spirit's presence in all human creativity and creation-in-community touches something deep in everyone we welcome and all we serve. It opens our eyes to see others in a way that they may not yet have ever been seen.

Ellen,
If you know of half a dozen writers and an inviting place to work (retreat place or other place away from cellphones and routine - cook for yourselves if it's someone's house) you can make it happen yourselves. It was helpful in our beginning that the first group were people who already prayed together Sunday by Sunday. It was helpful that some of us were in a monthly writers' group. There's a threshold the group needs to cross - choosing to share new, unfinished work. And there is a deep likeness between the power of people gathered to share prayer and silence and people gathered to venture into the unknown of creative work. Our writers and artists have said over the years that feeling or sensing what all is going on in the scattered work places people choose has given them courage to begin new work, sometimes big new work or to try something they've never attempted before.

Posted by Donald Schell | May 14, 2010 12:02 PM

Donald,

This reminds me of The MacDowell artist colony up the road from us in New Hampshire (www.macdowellcolony.org). But it also occurs to me that you may have discovered a new way to do "Cathedral" (which has traditionally supported artisans). You've also found a way for people to touch the monastic life, if only for a couple of weekends.

With people seeking spiritual experiences and flocking to yoga, spas, monasteries of all faiths, soul quests and any monastic-like experience they can find, I think that offering "spaces" like this needs to be a part of many of our congregation's offerings. Thanks for a memorable description of an organic process.

Posted by Linda Grenz | May 14, 2010 1:35 PM

Gorgeous. Affirms artists/creative people who will never make it to St. Gregory of Nyssa's. And makes me miss my spiritual director, who's gone to New Zealand for a month! What will she think when she comes back to read my latest installment? (She'll love it, but I want to be with her when she sees it, because that will somehow change the work in ways we can't anticipate.)

Posted by Josh Thomas | May 14, 2010 1:46 PM

I well remember Donald's visit with the group to Cazadero, and am astonished and grateful to have played even a small part in what has become St Gregory's and All Saints Company.

Raven was returned to the wild in another part of the State; I was invited to do research at Oxford (living next to the community was to come a decade later), but how could I ever forget such creative energies? It was clear even then that something extraordinary was unfolding.

Thank you, Donald, and for writing about it so beautifully.

Posted by Maggie Ross | May 14, 2010 2:45 PM

Thank you for this, Don --I've been trying to provide this kind of thing at the meta-level -- continuing ed, cathedral college when it existed, this year (actually next month) a conference at St. Mary's College on Poetry and the Journey Toward God -- but what a great idea to consider doing this at the parish or several-parish level and letting it become a kind of evangelism as well. I do think that creative artists and writers are very often the spiritual guides in our time -- great stuff. Thanks

Posted by Kathy Staudt | May 15, 2010 11:08 AM

Thanks Donald for this great article on our beloved Artists & Writers Retreat.

The readership might be interested to know that Donald read us part of this article as he was working on it at our last retreat, and he has incorporated some of the feedback that we gave. The interaction of creative people is a beautiful thing!

The magic of the retreat: doing your creative work in silence, knowing that your companions are doing the same. The shared energy is terrifically buoying and it helps us stay on track for the whole weekend. I get more done in those hours than in months at home.

For anyone wanting to start such a retreat, here's what has worked for us:
At meals, we talk all we want. After each meal we have "cafe readings," where people can share short finished pieces, no feedback except applause.

Then, in the hours after breakfast and lunch, we observe silence indoors. If people want to converse, they go outside, away from anyone who might be working. Staring into space, by the way, is considered working.

After dinner, we form groups to share work in progress. We focus on giving useful feedback, or just listening or looking--whatever the writer/artist wants. These sessions are great. Although I'm primarily a visual artist, I love hearing the writers.

The only problem with the retreat is that it is too short! As soon as one ends, we eagerly await the next one.

Posted by Janet Lohr | May 15, 2010 2:45 PM

What a lovely post Donald. As a member of the original writer's group, I was moved reading this. It rung completely true and was resonant with the surprised wonder of that retreat, when we found ourselves being silent together, writing together, listening deeply to each other, and experiencing ourselves and our words anew in the beauty of the deep listening. It was a kind of homecoming, a version of the hospitality inherent to St Gregory's and embedded in our tradition right back to all those feasts with the outcasts! Thank you for your decades of work and vision.

Posted by joan stockbridge | May 15, 2010 7:06 PM

Donald, thank you for this wonderful portrait of those weekends.

One of the most valuable aspects of attending these retreats (I attended several of them at St. Dorothy's) was the fact that one could stand up before the group and introduce oneself as a writer, composer, or artist without having to add "but I make my living as a _____." The opportunity to walk around for three days as a writer, with everyone in my midst believing it (for me and for everyone else there), did wonders for my creative confidence.

Posted by Jacob Slichter | May 17, 2010 9:21 AM

Donald, and all sorts of others whose names I know, whose work I know (you, Joan, you Jake), It is perfect to read about the retreats at St. Dorothy's. I attended for years and found my voice(s) there year after year, the typewriters clacking among the trees. (Computers were new and rare; so we punched old fashioned keys, got real workouts.) I recall wonderful hours of work, of meals, of laughs, of friends, insights, performance pieces that thrilled me to see come to life. Fabric Americans, anyone? That energy draws me back in, right this minute. I want to go to the retreat this fall. Used to be, the year started with Labor Day, at St. Dorothy's. Let me start again. Amen!

Posted by Laura Johnson-Bickford | May 18, 2010 7:56 PM

Donald, I enjoyed reading this good reflection. I treasure the times I attended the retreat and the friends I made there and friendships I deepened. Look forward to maybe attending again. You and the whole tribe of St Gregory's are great and always generous creators of community, and what could be more important?

Posted by Alan Venable | May 27, 2010 11:52 PM

Perhaps this is the final comment, but a heartfelt one, nonetheless. First,the familiar names from SGN; some at
the Cazadero retreat were
dear Joan Stockbridge and
Billy and Marie & many others...and Raven. When we formed the congregational
writers group, Donald kept on saying, "You can write, Dave" & I did!
David Vanderah

Posted by Peostus38 | June 26, 2010 10:21 PM

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