Ten years.
Originally published at Examorata. Please leave any comments there.
This weekend I went on retreat at a Trappist monastery in Berryville, VA. Never having done such a thing before, I was curious, filled mostly with interested anticipation but with a little trepidation. Would I go crazy, I wondered, with nearly 48 hours off the grid entirely, not just no internet, but no phone, no music, no talking?
The short answer is no. My other worries were more vague: would I find the rest and time to center myself I’d hoped for? Would I feel intimidated or put off by overt “religiosity”? Would I, simply put, just not feel like I fit in?
There are many cats at Holy Cross Abbey. There are signs on the retreat house warning that the cats are not allowed inside, “no matter how much they meow,” because some guests might be allergic. It wasn’t something I was anticipating. They don’t put on their website, “By the way, this place is FULL of cats!” But the cats are outside cats, rather like barn cats, but for the whole farm (the monastery is also a farm) and other buildings. At the small gift shop on the grounds, there were at least three mother cats and their litters of kittens - over a dozen kittens, all told, all around 7-10 weeks old. At the retreat house, there were four “regulars.” One in particular, a young (under six months) brown tabby female, spent a lot of time with me. I would sit in a wooden porch chair for an hour morning or evening, letting her sit on my lap and purr.
None of my worries came to any fruition. I felt welcome and peaceful and not pressured to have any kind of experience other than what I shaped for myself. Saturday afternoon, I went to the little shop to get a few goodies for my Mom (the monks make truffles!), and the monk who works at the shop was clearly a cat-caretaker with a great deal of love for his charges. He had one of the kittens from outside sitting with him, tucked into his cassock as he sat behind the counter. The kitten started mewing fiercely, and he got up to take him outside. We both said similar things to the mewing kitten, to quiet him down. Apparently vows of silence do not apply to talking to kittens!
Later, after I’d taken my purchases back to my room, I was again sitting on the porch with my new friend curled up on my lap. Another new friend, a slightly larger (but still not full-grown) black male cat, was curling around my legs. Suddenly, the door opened and they both ran from me to the door. It was the same monk from the gift shop! He chided them gently for abandoning me, and I said, “It’s all right, they’ve been spending lots of time with me.” It was the first sentence I’d uttered the whole weekend. The monk smiled, then teased the cats with the paper towel he held in his hands. What was in it?
Chicken! Fresh bits of chicken, cut up specially for the cats. He leaned to put the chicken in their bowl, and letting the brown tabby begin to eat, he picked up the black one and sat in the chair next to me. The black one did not really want to play “sit still” but the monk got him calmed down. And we chatted. These two had been born in the spring, down at the shop. But at some point they decided to move up to the guest house.
It was an unexpected moment. Of all the things I thought I might have a conversation about on my retreat weekend, when I figured I might not have any conversations at all, cats were not even on the list. But there it was. This convivial monk, bearing a passing resemblance to Wilford Brimley, was someone I might have had nothing else in common with in the world. He was of a different generation, and had taken a very different life path than I have.
But there we were, on common ground, built out of simple love.
Today at church, my last retreat activity barring lunch, the main theme was forgiveness. My own theme for the weekend seemed to be all the things we have in common. Not just monks and cats, but all of us. Though our differences can be large and can seem overwhelming, I think that ultimately we are more alike than we are different. The line about forgiveness that struck me most was this: “Forgiveness is about reminding ourselves that we all hurt others.”
We do. We all hurt others, and we are all hurt. It is another thing we have in common. On this day, a day where we think about hurt, instead I have chosen to think about the other things we have in common. Even the ones we may not know about yet.
Note: I have already written a remembrance, on the five-year anniversary. For me, it felt important to move in a different direction. Each of us can decide for ourselves how best we would like to commemorate, think about, and otherwise put in perspective the events of that day that touched us all.