Falling into Grace
Sister Susan wrote to me that I’d be staying in the cabin “Namaste.”
Weeks before, I’d arranged to spend five days at one of the retreat cabins at Cedars of Peace on the Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse’s grounds in Nerinx, Kentucky. I replied to Sister Susan mentioning how much meaning the word Namaste held for me. (I worked with many Bhutanese refugees at the time, and we greeted each other this way.) She remarked how interesting it was that the cabins’ themes always seemed a perfect fit for each retreatant.
But the day before my arrival, in what would be one of the hottest weeks of the summer, she wrote saying there had been a cancellation and I’d be staying in “Grace.” I’d be more comfortable there because it had an air conditioning unit.
I arrived to another note from Sister Susan. She said she hoped I would find in the quiet solitude of “Grace” all that I was seeking. Funny, I thought. I hadn’t really come to the Cedars seeking anything. My main objective was to spend a few uninterrupted days writing.
After unpacking, I found a journal in which retreatants were invited to share reflections about their stay. As I began to read through the journal entries, I began sobbing. I could feel the pain and love of all the people who had come before me, who had shared their inner journeys and extended blessings to all those who would walk through the door of “Grace” in the future. It wasn’t how I’d expected the first few hours of my stay to unfold, but I figured a good emotional purge was a decent way to begin my writing spree.
And then I saw it. An almond-shaped head, peeking out from under the bookshelf. When the lime- and cocoa-colored striped lizard finally emerged, I noted that its tail alone was almost the size of my head. I chased it around the cabin, hoping to capture it under a garbage can, but it slithered away to regions unknown.
I decided to take a walk around the pond to get my mind off the intruder, but doggone if that lizard didn’t haunt my thoughts. I imagined it crawling across my body, over my stomach, and into my mouth as I slept at night. (I wasn’t naïve enough to think this lizard was the only creature lurking in the dark corners of my cabin, but at least the others had the decency not to show their faces--or tails.)
I finally told myself that the lizard didn’t want me in the cabin any more than I wanted it. I pictured how cute it was, really, when I’d stopped chasing it and took the time to observe its amazing body. How it had placed both front legs behind its back at one point and just rested, open-eyed, in the sun, like a monk pondering one of life’s mysteries. I told myself on the way back to the cabin that I was just going to have to learn to cohabitate with it.
And just like that, I never saw that lizard again.
This encounter set the theme for my stay at “Grace”: less resistance, more acceptance.
Before I set down to write, I said a little prayer that I’d write something selfless, something of beauty that would transcend where I was at. Almost immediately I heard a voice say, How about you start where you’re at?
The next day, I went to the common area to peruse the small library for retreatants. My eye locked on a title by Pema Chödrön: Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living. I started to head for the door—I had brought plenty of books with me—but the book called to me again. I went back and picked it up with an Alright already sigh.
I think there are books (like people) that come into our lives for a season, reason, or lifetime. This has been one of those books for me. One sentence in the book reminded me of my experience with the lizard. “When the resistance is gone, so are the demons.”
I come from a family of overachievers and perfectionists, and what I find most attractive about Chödrön, a Buddhist nun, is her gentle approach. She writes that when we start from a place of honoring where we are and not where we hope to be someday, when we start facing our demons and stop rejecting and repressing our shadow sides, then we can begin to see everything that happens to us—even the suffering—as opportunities to wake up, figure out where we’re stuck, and grow.
Like the peacock that gets its vivid and beautiful tail by eating poison, Chödrön explains that our “poisons” can be a source of great beauty. By accepting the parts of ourselves we find most disagreeable, we grow in self-understanding and compassion. And that understanding and compassion can extend outward. “If you can know it in yourself, you can know it in everyone.”
The theologian Paul Tillich writes in his essay “You Are Accepted,” “We cannot force ourselves to accept ourselves. We cannot compel anyone to accept himself. But sometimes it happens that we receive the power to say “yes” to ourselves, that peace enters into us and makes us whole, that self-hate and self-contempt disappear, and that our self is reunited with itself. Then we can say that grace has come upon us.”
Blog cover image by Ryan Stone on Unsplash