This week, members of the SCS staff and faculty community made their way out to Georgetown’s Calcagnini Contemplative Center for a day retreat. Nestled between the gratitude themes of Thanksgiving and the joyful anticipation themes of the coming holidays, the day-long retreat offered a welcome bit of pause from the demands of daily work.
I co-led the retreat with Rabbi Rachel Gartner, SCS Senior Advisor for Pastoral Care, and we began the day by inviting the group to open themselves up to the experience. While the day retreat might feel like a limited window for meaningful reflection, we encouraged everyone to allow themselves to fully experience the transformative potential of a few short hours away from campus.
In a circle, retreatants reflected on the meaning of work in their lives and how that meaning has potentially shifted over the years of pandemic, transition, and return. Offering wisdom from the Jewish tradition, Rabbi Rachel invited the group to consider the joys, the challenges, and the so-so of work life.
Rabbi Rachel’s series of questions invited deeper reflection on each person’s “why” at work. This open-ended question led to a final question about the possibility of making a change, either internally or in an external action of some kind, that puts one in closer touch with the why of their day-to-day life. The group grew in its understanding, empathy, and kinship by listening to what individuals anonymously named as their own thoughts and feelings. Within an hour of arriving, the group had already begun to develop some significant communal bonds.
In the afternoon, I offered a short presentation on the examen of consciousness and then led the group in the practice. By taking stock of each component of the “long, loving, look at the real,” we can appreciate that taking time for pause and quiet in our day, reflecting on the meaning of our daily experience, is possible even without a trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains. A daily examen can happen anywhere and its practicality reflects the Spirit of Georgetown value of Contemplation in Action.
Like the retreat offered for SCS students last spring, this was the first in-person retreat of its kind for SCS faculty and staff in over three years. The desire to be reconnected to one another in person, in a community-building setting, was evident throughout the experience. I noticed the joys that are possible when colleagues, some who did not know each other, come together in a relaxed and reverential setting with the explicit purpose of slowing down and savoring the particular details of our daily lives. I noticed myself feeling deep joy overhearing laughter and energized conversation at lunch. I also noticed the formation of deeper relationships between co-workers and a deeper appreciation of the possibilities of living out the Spirit of Georgetown.
We left Calcagnini with a renewed sense of how we can serve Georgetown’s mission as individuals and as a community. And we left the retreat with an energy about the need to pause every day to notice and savor the world around us and the world within us.
Rabbi Rachel ended the morning session with Rumi’s poem, “The Guest House,” which is a fitting affirmation of the need for retreats like this one.
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.