We received a beautiful letter from Jean Vanier sharing his reflections on retreat as he celebrated his sixtieth birthday and the 25th anniversary of the L'Arche communities. He writes in part:
Sixty years is a turning point in life, and I am trying to prepare for it. I know that after sixty we begin to lose strength. I ask Jesus to help me grow old as He wants. If to disappear, how to trust others more, how to live with less power, but more from the grace of Jesus and the poor and to be more centered in prayer. In my prayer here I have a deeper desire to do the will of God, to be a friend and a servant of Jesus, and to let Jesus penetrate more and more into my whole being. Often my prayer has been just that: inviting Jesus to come with Light and Love into all the darkest, most hidden corners of my being.
I was beginning to realize that you must
come slowly to a place; wait a little before
feverishly resorting to guidebooks...Place
has a mighty tongue of its own.
It is not enough to seek and care; to pay lip service to all manner of ideals. Real witness is what counts. It is something to do with leaps in the dark. Recognizing that Truth is hidden. But transformation towards truth is something else. It is practice and diligence.
Every night I had a sense to consciously pitch the tent of my being in a definite place of "unknowing." Bang in the pegs saying, I do not know anything. Inside the tent it might be dark, or maybe there were spins of moonlight. But in there, somehow or other, you know there is love. Love is, and may proceed from wherever you are, without you knowing anything very much.
As they talked together of The Way, the obstacles, the people, the signs ... you felt the great importance of the physicality of the quest. All of them stressed the power of silence: the need to be alone and find oneself in the silence. Moving alone, with silence as the single companion, seems a most profound means to register the natural balance of the world without, and world within.
A pair of long, black woolen stockings hung there, and in one of them a huge darn. A perfected circle of calmly woven thread, no bobble or tug, no tension, no rough knot. Only someone very special, stable, and peaceful could make that kind of darn. To me it was a work of art. To do the smallest thing so supremely well, it had to be done with Love.
