GilChrist: No Place Special
by Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma
I’ve slowly been working my way through a book called The Four Vision Quests of Jesus, by Steven Charleston. Charleston is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, and his book is an effort to share what he has learned by walking the path of both traditions simultaneously. I’m primarily spending time with this book for my own learning and growth, but as I read his chapter “The Quest,” I found myself thinking of our work here at GilChrist, and at retreat centers in general.
Many of our guests from an array of spiritual lineages arrive here at GilChrist in the spirit of quest, as Charleston describes it:
We prepare ourselves to answer the call to a quest.
We seek the support of friends and mentors.
We accept the discipline of our intentions.
We express our deepest longings.
While the experience of a quest may take on extraordinary significance in our lives, the stuff of the quest itself is actually quite ordinary, rooted in the materials of earth, the living creation around us, and the messiness of our human questions. We may come to retreat with a deep, fundamental question about our life’s purpose, but we also still need to settle details with the dog sitter—a supremely ordinary act that is already rooted in a purpose-ful commitment to be a faithful human caretaker of a non-human creature. Ultimately, the revelation of the quest is about a dissolution of boundaries. Charleston writes,
…the quest is not about transcendence, but transformation. And transformation is not necessarily transcendence. In fact, it can be just the opposite. Transformation can mean a grounding into reality, a deepening into the infinite. Transformation is a process of forming a human life from the substance of that life itself. Seen in this context, the quest is not an escape from reality, but a passage into an even deeper reality. It is not designed to reveal something hidden, but to alert us to something in plain sight. It does not give us a secret wisdom, but makes us reconsider what we have always known. The quest is an invitation to go deeper.
The calling to pursue a quest is as old as humanity…and nearly as old as humanity is the urge to commodify the quest for profit. Charleston’s critique is powerful:
Native American traditions have been strip-mined to supply the window dressing for pseudo-religious practices. Self-proclaimed “shamans” abound. Self-styled “medicine men” and “medicine women” are abundant. They offer sweat lodges and vision quests for people to experience for a price. They promise to give their disciples “power animals” and “spirit guides.” They use drumming as a hypnotic tool to make their hybrid rituals seem authentic.
The antidote Charleston makes a case for is not a rigorously trademarked Native American version of a quest, but a decommercialized authenticity that releases any notion of the experience depending on the right guru, the right practice, the right ritual. He’s especially critical of the idea that we need to find the right place:
The quest…is the reverse of intentionally placing ourselves in harm’s way. It is an act of placing ourselves in grace’s way. We are looking for that point of intersection where we think we are most likely to encounter God. These locations, which we sometimes call the thin places of our reality, are not defined by geography, but by intention. While I understand there are many geographical locations that people revere, I do not believe that any of these places are magic portals to transformation. The key to the seeker’s quest is not in finding just the right piece of holy real estate on which to stand, but rather in so preparing his or her awareness that any space he or she occupies can become thin through faith.
Charleston’s conviction rings true, and also presents a challenge to retreat centers whose work is largely sustained by financial exchanges and a place-based legacy of creating the “right” conditions for transformation. In this context, should retreat centers even exist? I don’t think Charleston would suggest that we should all throw in the towel, but I do think his framing offers both a critique and a liberating word. The critique: don’t sell snake oil. Don’t make promises we know we can’t keep, sell what is priceless, or build a so-called contemplative empire on stolen practices. The liberating word to retreat centers, as I understand it, is: try softer. Embrace the freedom to trust the ordinariness of our work.
Over the course of the past year and a half, I’ve had significantly less interaction with our guests as we’ve worked to make our solo retreats contactless and safe within the COVID context. This past week, we welcomed a group of teachers with a carefully adapted, simplified version of the retreats we’ve hosted for them in the past. The light agenda included an outdoor closing on the last evening, during which we received the gift of witnessing the renewing, transformative power of a simple set of conditions: a cabin, a canopy, some trails and treats, a group text thread, guided meditation in the fresh twilight air, and perhaps most powerfully, an open invitation to spend unscheduled time in whatever way they needed to. After a year and a half of separation and isolation, it was a revelation again that: it works. The work we do to tend and keep in all the ordinary ways helps create the conditions for rest, release, and reimagining. And the effectiveness is not measured by our center’s bottom line, but by what each guest takes back home with them to support their work in the world, for the flourishing of all creation.
That takeaway is sometimes a revolutionary “aha” moment, but often it’s far more ordinary: the way a comfortable chair by a window framing a bird feeder makes me feel at peace. How long it’s been since I was conscious of my breath. A single word that becomes an anchor. Charleston writes,
Whether we physically choose to carry out our quest on a mountain top or a rooftop makes no difference. The real location is the nexus point of spiritual awareness. We do not leave the finite. We do not enter the infinite. We stand at the place of intersection. We do not transcend our own reality, much less the reality of the infinite, but we are positioned for transformation because when the mundane becomes a vehicle for the sacred, things change.
And that’s why GilChrist is no place special. In fact, “specialness” may be antithetical to our ultimate hope that the transformation we support explodes beyond our borders to take over the whole world. We are a lovely rest area on a much longer journey. We are the stockers-of-shelves on third shift, the elves making shoes, the women religious rising at 4:00 am to pray for the life of the world. We are midwives of change that is always already being born.
Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma is head caretaker at GilChrist Retreat Center in Three Rivers, MI, and a member of the Retreat Center Collaboration’s steering committee.