Vermont I - The Chapel and the Sweat Lodge

     As I write this, I'm on my third annual "conscious contact" retreat of folks in recovery at the beautiful eastern Vermont location of the Weston Priory. We're in the Green Mountains and out beyond my window at the desk where I write this is a small mountain (a 'monticello!"), getting clearer to my sight and more defined as the morning light rises. The clouds, just a few minutes ago mauve in the dawn light, are now an array of grays and beiges and whites. They scud across the little mountain top, pushed from the north as they journey to unknown parts south.

     It was just over a year ago that I began this blog at this same desk, looking at this same mountain and the surrounding woods. It's been a momentous year in part because I nearly lost my life to a virulent staph infection. But it's also been a year of blessings, especially in the people who rallied around my wife and me, Just as I wrote that sentence, I looked up and saw an immense cloud, bathed in sharp, pink light, move across the mountain top. It was followed by outlier clouds, russet and violet against a deepening blue sky. The trees at this time of morning take on tones of white and gray and green, and the whole scene changes from moment to moment. It's dynamic, powerful and peaceful all at once. The fullness of it all is surely a metaphor.

     The morning began before dawn, just a couple of hours ago. A few of us walked up the road towards the priory, a collection of buildings that recall a Vermont farm, but with a difference. Halfway up the wooded country road, bells rang out through the darkness, calling the monks and any willing lay folk like ourselves to the ancient morning prayer of the Church. In a few minutes, we arrived and entered the chapel which was mostly in darkness. The chapel looks and feels a bit like a Zendo, but with the flickering light of a eucharistic chapel off to the right. The prayer begins with a rainstick, drums and the light of a few candles, then proceeds to  sung psalms, readings and prayer. "Let the heedless get the trouble they need!" went one sharp petition.

     The darkness dispelled by low light, an ancient language (Greek in the Kyrie) and the drum recall another sacred space I am privileged to attend regularly, a sweat ceremony on the land of the Shinnecock nation not far from where we live. In that ceremony, two medicine people, Shinnecock and Kiowah, respectively, lead the people in prayer, chant and ritual actions, much of which is in the ancient language of the Lakota nation. At the priory we sang the ancient words, "In the shadow of your wings, my heart rejoices." In the sweat lodge there comes a moment where people experience the sensation of eagle wings circling inside the lodge -- a contact the Creator grants as a gift to the men and women struggling in the intense heat to pray more open-heartedly. As the heat rises from the "Grandfathers," the stones  glowing red from the fire in which they lay for a few hours, the people in the circle of the lodge cry out, "Pity, me - pity me!" hoping for help in enduring the heat for the sake of their prayers. No such endurance is called for by the chapel-goers, except perhaps the struggle to stay awake at this hour of the morning.

     A little over an hour later, writing at this desk, the sun has come up a ways, with the ridges and valleys becoming clearer and more defined in the beautiful cold sunshine. I think of the two spaces, chapel and sweat lodge, and how they connect and complement each other in my life. I feel blessed to share in the experience of each one. "Kyrie elieson (Lord, have mercy!)" and "Mitakuye oyassin (All my relations!)" join in my heart and make me full.