Contemplation In The City, March 2025
Our wild and precious lives
Contemplation In The City, March 2025
Hello, friends and fellow contemplatives!
Here we are, on the cusp of Lent, that season of simplicity, prayer and fasting (in its many guises). Is there a new discipline you’d like to commit to or take up this season? Is there anything you plan to give up? I know there has lately been some resistance to the tradition of giving things up, but I personally find it edifying to look at my life and identify those places where I can simplify or cut back on that which is not life-giving or leading to growth.
Whatever your Lent practice, we’ve got a number of opportunities to help support it in the 40-odd days ahead, including:
Sun. Mar. 2, 10-11:30am: In-person Sunday service (Metanoia Journey) Tues. Mar. 4, 6-8pm: Contemplative service (Life In The City); coffee at 6, service at 7 Sat. Mar. 29, 10am-3pm: Intro to Centering Prayer workshop (Metanoia Journey) Sun. Mar. 30, 10-11am: Journey with John (Life In The City) Mon. Apr 21-Fri. Apr 25: Discovering Renewal 2025 in Montreat, NC
Details on all this and more further along in the newsletter.
I’ve been packing lunch for my son Henry since he was in preschool. Over fourteen years, that’s more than 2500 sandwiches, apples and chocolate-chip cookies. I love doing this. It feels like a sacrament, like preparing the communion table. It’s also come to feel like part of my identity. Sometimes I wonder who I’ll be when I no longer have a boy to pack lunch for.
In addition to food, I always sneak some spiritual sustenance into Henry’s lunchbox in the form of quotes. I love quotes. I’ve got tons of them filling notebooks and scrawled on scraps of paper scattered around the house—in sock drawers, under pillows, on end tables. Every night at supper we pick one out of a jar and it becomes our guide for the next day (last night’s: If we surrendered to the earth’s intelligence, we could rise up rooted like trees. Rainer Maria Rilke). But lunch also gets a quote, and there’s one that’s gotten more play than all others—the final lines of Mary Oliver’s classic poem The Summer Day:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
I’ve never asked Henry to answer this question. I’ve wanted only to give him the question—something to chew on while he’s chewing his cheese sandwich. And I have given him this question, again and again and again, to the point that he finally told me at the start of this present school year that it was annoying and I needed new material. So, I reluctantly retired Mary Oliver.
In addition to giving quotes for lunch, I often gift Henry homemade coupons for Christmas. This past Christmas, I printed out a coupon with the word Silence on it. I then sealed it in an envelope and placed it under the tree alongside a new pair of Nike high-tops, an Apple pen and a gift card to Waterloo Records. When Henry opened the envelope he eyed me with suspicion and said, “Do I actually want this gift?” I said, “Yes. Even if you don’t know it yet.” He rolled his eyes.
And so, last month, in fulfillment of this gift, we found ourselves at New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, one of the last easy(ish)-to-reach, off-the-grid places in North America. There, the nearest cellphone signal is an hour’s drive away. There is no internet, TV, news or social media, nothing to distract or entertain. Nowhere to go, nothing to do but be present. What there is in abundance is silence, solitude, and self-reflection, things few adults are comfortable with in the 21st century, to say nothing of 16-year old boys.
To be honest, in the weeks leading up to the trip, I was braced for Henry to initiate tense negotiations about what was allowable. Could he download movies to his iPad? Listen to Kendrick Lamar in his ear buds? Play Roblox on his phone? My answers would have been no, no and no. But much to my surprise, he never asked.
He did, however, ask what a typical day at New Camaldoli looked like. I offered a cryptic answer: “Like a summer day in the 20th century.”
My guess is most of you reading this will know what I mean. Do you remember as a kid waking up on summer mornings and feeling the hours spread out like a vast ocean? I do. Even with all my chores—weeding and hoeing our gardens; driving the mowing tractor; doing laundry—there was still time to climb trees, hike the mountains around our house, read, listen to the radio, stare up at the sky, toss a ball with my brother. There’s no hoeing or mowing at New Camaldoli, but there’s that same spaciousness of time I recall from those long-ago summer days.
I wasn’t sure how Henry would do with that. Like a lot of kids these days he’s highly-scheduled with homework, sports and choir obligations. He’s got precious little downtime. But I needn’t have worried. He took to silence and solitude like a fish to water. I thought he’d be constantly looking to me to entertain him. Instead, he ventured out on solo hikes, took lots of pictures, read one book and half of another, enjoyed naps, lazed in the grass.
I think I was right when I said at Christmas that the silence was something he wanted even if he didn’t yet know it. I think we all crave it these days—again, whether we know it or not. We did not evolve to be constantly connected, distracted and interrupted as we are now. Feeling constantly on is terrible for adults. Study after study has shown it’s disastrous for kids. So, I am thankful that places like New Camaldoli still exist—beyond the reach of social media, cable news and cellphones buzzing with the latest outrage. I think if everyone could spend a few days at a place like this, just once a year, the world would be much different, much gentler and kinder.
I know that’s not possible. But nothing stops us from making hermitages of our hearts—setting aside quiet minutes, drinking coffee with reverence, walking the dog like we’re strolling with Jesus, preparing supper with the care we’d bring to cooking the Last Supper. That way of life is always here, always available. We have only to choose it.
At New Camaldoli one afternoon, finding Henry’s room empty, I went looking for him. I found him a half-mile down the road, seated on the bench in the picture at the top of this reflection. When I got close, I could see he was looking at a scrap of paper in his hand. I leaned over his shoulder and, much to my surprise, saw it was one of the many scraps of paper I’ve given him over the years on which I scrawled Mary Oliver’s timeless question, that one he told me had become so annoying: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
I sat down next to him. For a while we rested in silence. Then, for the first time ever, I said, “So, what do you think? What do you plan to do?”
Henry thought about it a moment. Then he held his hand out toward the mountains and sea and sky which in that place seem to go on forever and said meaningfully, mysteriously, “This.”
Greg Durham Austin, Texas February, 2025
Pair this reflection with The Summer Day by Mary Oliver:
Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Upcoming Contemplative Gatherings
Upcoming services for Contemplation In The City are Mar. 4, Apr. 8 and May 13. *Please note the new date for May.* We meet at Life In The City, 205 East Monroe Street, Austin. Doors open at 6pm for coffee and casual conversation. The service begins at 7pm and lasts for approximately 1 hour. If you have questions about Contemplation In The City, Life In The City or Centering Prayer meditation, please contact Greg Durham at greg@litcaustin.org.
Our friends at Metanoia Journey have a rich menu of contemplative offerings, including a regular Sunday morning centering prayer and lectio divina session which happens on Zoom, and a beautiful in-person service on the first Sunday of each month. I highly recommend their upcoming Intro to Centering Prayer workshop.
Discovering Renewal: *Please note that the Contemplative track is full. If you want to go but hadn’t yet signed up, email me at greg@litcaustin.org as soon as possible. There may be unused spots on other tracks that I can ask Montreat to transfer to the Contemplative track.* In April 2025, I will be leading a Contemplative track at the wonderful Discovering Renewal retreat. This very affordable, annual gathering in the gorgeous mountains of western North Carolina is an opportunity to relocate your center of spiritual gravity while also having lots of fun. Details here.
More upcoming events at Life In The City
Sun, Mar 30, 10-11am: Journey With John, a contemplative, conversational walk with the fourth gospel’s wisdom and way of abundant life. Monthly through 2025. Join at any time.
If these emails are meaningful to you, subscribe and share. Any questions or comments, leave them in the Comments section below, or contact me at greg@litcaustin.org.
I’ve had that Mary Oliver quote on my letterboard hung up in my house for several years. Such a compelling question no matter what age in years.