A couple of days before Epiphany, during a conversation in the car in which I was talking about not wanting to leave Holy Hill and feeling like there wasn't anything tugging me back home, the question was posed "why don't you just stay for a few more months?"
So I had a talk with Sister Pat to find out what the thinking was behind her proposal. She made the point, “why leave if you’re happy and growing and you don’t have any reason to leave?” Her offer was for me to stay for 3 more months and do some more intentional spiritual formation with the community. She gave me a week to decide.
When the proposal was made, it immediately resonated with me, but there were plenty of resistances in me, too – not the least of which was the idea of having to tell people that I’d changed my plans! I was also worried that staying here might just be a form of running away from the decisions I’ll have to make about my future because I don’t feel ready to make them yet...(Previously, whenever I thought about leaving, I would get anxious and upset, not just because I was enjoying Holy Hill so much, but also because I felt like I would be leaping into a void, and I was afraid of that.) On the flip side, I was also nervous about the possibility of getting bored here or feeling like I’m not accomplishing anything practical.
I’ve been reading a little book on the Rule of Benedict by Esther deWall, and she/he said some things about stability that I feel articulates part of the significance for me of choosing to remain here. By staying in one place, I am “persevering” with the inner journey I have begun here, rather than continuing “this bewildering and exhausting rushing from one thing to another,” “flitting about collecting a ragbag of well-intentioned but half-though-out ideals based on a confused amalgam of some of the more attractive elements in each.” (not quite what I've been doing, but a good point nonetheless). As a quote I copied from another book I was reading says, “We have to seize the opportunities that lie at hand...Life must not be the span in which we DO many things but LIVE none of them.” So I am seizing this opportunity and choosing to live it. I am “hanging on, not running away [from myself, from commitment], sticking it out in the situation in which God has put me, and in the context of these people.”
I’m choosing 3 months of directed spiritual formation, taking the time to explore my questions about faith and about living a holy/whole life, about monasticism and what it is about it that draws me, and what aspects of the rule of life here I might be able to carry with me into my life elsewhere. I will have support in my discernment of the next steps, and I will get to spend time choosing/singing/playing music for worship, and in the garden, dreaming up a community permaculture project!
It’s not that I couldn’t go home and find all of these things there as well, but why leave when it’s all right here in front of me already? Plus, it feels really good to be staying put for a bit longer, rather than moving on again. By the time I leave I will have been at Holy Hill for almost 7 months, which is the longest I’ve been anywhere since the 7 months I spent at Agape!
I feel a deep sense of peace and joy at being able to take this time here with this community, and I feel like it's one of the most right decisions I've ever made.
