Within the woods of central Maryland there sits an unassuming chair. It’s large, thick, and previous. It’s set instead, with wood legs sinking into mud and grass and stone, overlooking a trickling spring. There’s no telling what number of dwelling creatures have settled in its wood body over the course of time: squirrels cracking nuts, birds scouting nesting websites, people pausing for moments of reflection.

I fell below the final class not so way back whereas on retreat—a day of silence and solitude—in those self same woods. I had been slowly, rigorously, meditatively selecting my method alongside the paths, having set out into the tough winter, abandoning the smoldering hearth that so kindly warmed the rooms within the previous retreat heart cabin.

The panorama was brown, nonetheless, and useless. Tall bushes towered excessive and barren; colorless leaves crunched below foot. After which this chair was simply sitting there, peacefully.

I approached with reverence, struck by this straightforward piece of furnishings stranded within the woods. Somebody had positioned it there, somebody who knew nothing of me or my ideas however who cared for the numerous someones like me who handed this manner all the identical.

I stood alongside that chair, learning it. A poem got here to thoughts, a number of stanzas tripping over each other, jumbled however significant all the identical. The poem was “Typically,” and the poet, David Whyte, writes about shifting rigorously via a forest and passing over dry leaves in silence and stillness and finally coming “to a spot whose solely job is to hassle you.”

Whose solely job is to hassle you.

I felt like I’d stepped into the poem, like I had crossed some hidden threshold between my very own life and that of the poet’s and that I used to be seeing behind the scenes on the uncooked materials he’d used to craft his poem.

I walked in silence; the leaves had been dry. I stood alone in a forest that was unusual to me. And I knew what got here subsequent in that poem; I recite it on a regular basis. As a result of the place, Whyte claims, troubles with “questions which have patiently waited for you, questions that haven’t any proper to go away.”

I take into consideration this second not a lot as a result of I had some nice non secular breakthrough or profound encounter with God whereas sitting in that chair—although actually I sat for an extended whereas and prayed and God whispered in my being. Moderately, I take into consideration the air of holy context with which I arrived at that second and the way the phrases—jumbled although they had been—fairly instantly and decisively arrived in my thoughts, spilling out and over and into the actual and tangible world round me.

I’m left questioning how a easy chair in a fairly unremarkable nook of the Maryland wilderness instantly assumed an aura of sacred profundity. Due to a easy poem I’ve learn on quite a few events, my stroll within the woods grew to become transcendent; I used to be extra able to encounter God. The straightforward act of being there was sufficient.

What energy phrases have! The flexibility to remodel an strange second right into a sacred encounter—isn’t that what the Ignatian custom has insisted all alongside? By poems, prayer texts, mantras, and prose, the Spirit strikes and works right here, on this place, making ready us to come across extra deeply that very same Spirit at work somewhere else—locations we might have but to seek out however which we are going to know intimately once we do, locations by which we are going to then be all of the extra able to sink into the dwelling God.

Pleased Nationwide Poetry Month.

Photograph by Abdul Azeez Garbadeen on Unsplash.