Lenten Seeds by Richard Lehan

There is a seed that God has planted in me and is going to make grow. What I have to provide is the love and assent that’s going to permit it to grow.

– Thomas Merton, from a talk to the Sisters of Loretto

Last year I attended a “Contemplative Lenten Weekend” retreat at the Jesuit-owned Eastern Point Retreat Center on the Gloucester “Neck,” off the coast of Cape Ann in Massachusetts. To help foster the proper disposition, I first drove by the Downs, T. S. Eliot’s boyhood summer home on Edgemoor Road, a mile and half from the retreat center. Built by his family in 1896 when he was eight years old, he spent summers there until he went off to Harvard. “The Dry Salvages,” one of the poems comprising his collection Four Quartets, is named after a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off Cape Ann. The poem references “the ragged rock in the restless waters” while pondering, among other themes, “the point of intersection of the timeless with time” and what it costs to apprehend and live inside it. “For most of us,” Eliot writes, “this is the aim never to be realized here; who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying.”

I went straight from Eliot’s memory palace to the retreat center, arriving that Friday afternoon in early March. After several days of raw, rainy weather, the sky was an unblemished blue. A fierce storm, however, was forecast for the following evening.

The centerpiece of the Eastern Point facility is a granite-hewn estate built by the wealthy Prentiss family in 1921; the three-floor retreat wing was added by the Jesuits in 2016. My room was on the third floor of the wing overlooking a matted back lawn that hugged Brace Cove. Nearby, a narrow dike separated Niles Pond from the cove. The rhythmic crashing of waves against the shore became the sonic signature of the weekend.

It was late winter, a fallow time when signs of spring are nonexistent. After checking in, I climbed a massive outcropping of rocks buttressed against the incoming tide. The stones at the shoreline were colored coffee-brown by their constant inundation in seawater. Gulls glided over the waves. The vast, ceaseless ocean was a bracing reminder of the minuteness and transience of being human. Elsewhere on the grounds were stands of bare trees, their bud-free branches tangled up in each other. How many dormant seeds were buried underground with no guarantee of coming to fruition? Along the edge of the pond, a line of bleached-out cattails towered over me, exhausted after the onslaught of a season of heavy weather. Already, the retreat’s austere setting was preparing me for the contemplative work to come.

On Saturday morning the retreatants gathered for our first prayer session in what had once been the ballroom. One of the handouts provided by the facilitators included an excerpt from The Silent Land, Martin Laird’s book on contemplative prayer. A contemplative practice, Laird writes, cannot be reduced to a spiritual “technique,” which suggests a means of control for determining a certain outcome. Instead, to sit in contemplation “simply disposes us to allow something to take place.” To illustrate the difference, Laird notes the obvious: a gardener does not grow plants but practices gardening skills that facilitate the plant’s growth; the latter is beyond the gardener’s direct control. Similarly, contemplative prayer arises from cultivating the skill of interior silence.

Laird’s analogy brought to mind Jesus’s parable of the seeds. Only a seed planted in good soil has a chance to flourish. Paradoxically, the seed must die in order for new life to emerge. In the same way, a contemplative practice must be rooted in the rich loam of commitment. A dying to self is the necessary precursor to spiritual growth.

During a break in late morning, I walked up to the Eastern Point Lighthouse and then down to the entrance of Eastern Point Boulevard, the sole access point to the Neck. The darkened, stately homes and the absence of traffic on the road deepened the solitude of my sojourn. Later that afternoon, a group of us went for a contemplative walk on the grounds, encouraged by the facilitators to thoroughly immerse ourselves in our natural surroundings. It seemed a fitting exercise; after all, Christian tradition tells us that nature itself is the “big book” of God’s revelation. One of the facilitators offered a spiritual reading at each stop on our walk. The writings of Teilhard de Chardin were her favorite. I recall one from The Human Phenomenon:

Seeing. We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb. Union increases only through an increase in consciousness, that is to say, in vision. And that, doubtless, is why the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something to be seen.

I remember standing silently amid the stripped-down trees, attuning myself to the actual sound of crashing waves that had become mere white noise. Then a sudden amplification drowned out the waves. I glanced up at the sky: a jet was soaring overhead. Human-generated intrusions are everywhere; no contemplative practice is insulated from them. The task is to make such distractions an aid to your practice.

Our walk was followed by a Q&A session with the facilitators. Two takeaways resonated with me:

If you stay with contemplative prayer long enough, it becomes “irresistible.”

Trust that change is happening, even if you can’t consciously feel or name it.

After another prayer session in the ballroom, we ended the day with a Vigil Mass celebrating the Third Sunday of Lent. Overnight, the storm raged as the mournful sound of the foghorn on the lighthouse kept time with the tempest.

On Sunday morning I ate breakfast again in the glass-walled dining room facing the ocean. My fellow retreatants began trickling in, ordinary seekers like me hoping for a fresh start or at least a respite from their grooved-in lives. Under a quilted gray sky, the still churning waves battered the rocky shore. Weathering a storm in this briny environment requires a honed resilience, one bent on driving every nascent seed to its intended end.

For our closing contemplative prayer session, I chose a chair next to the glass doors off the fireplace. The muffled sea rumbled in the background. When the sun finally broke through, the stream of light through the windows reminded me to stay confident in the promise of the flowering to come. ♦

Richard Lehan is an essayist and fiction writer living in Massachusetts. Several of his essays have previously appeared in Today’s American Catholic, the most recent being “Chasing the White Whale: Moby Dick as Spiritual Formation.”

Image: Gloucester coastline from the air. Magnus Machado / Unsplash