Today is our retreat day at Regina Retreat Center in Nashville, Indiana. This lovely home on fifty acres was given to Our Lady of Grace Monastery by a local family.  Each time folks gather here we pray with thanks for the Schilling family.

It’s a little over an hour’s drive from Beech Grove. Sister Mary Luke, Teri, and I left near sunrise to get ready for the later arriving Women Touched by Grace. The drive through rural Indiana was bursting with spring.

One of the sweetest parts of preparing for a retreat is to be ready early enough to have time to be still and wait before the arrival of our expected friends.  The Sisters model taking time to be prepared as part of their spiritual rule of hospitality.  Thanks to Luke’s good planning, we had a gracious time of quiet conversation and peering from the window in anticipation. 

Or a cross on the unfamiliar path back home.

Today we begin: nineteen wonderful women clergy and the Pastor as Spiritual Mentor. Teri, my co-facilitator, led a thought-provoking conversation about pastors as mentors. Referring to Eugene Peterson’s Under the Unpredicatable Plant, Teri reminded us that sometimes we are called to walk with folks in our parishes during extraordinarily difficult times of grief, illness, and hardship.  That time our role may be what Peterson calls messiah (not with a capital M).  Sometimes we are helping keep order in the church, and our role is what he calls manager. But our unique role as pastors is what Peterson calls spiritual director.  This facet of clergy life is what we’re exploring in our understanding of our role as spiritual mentors.

Peterson reminds us that it is not the clergy’s job to mange the Kingdom but to be attentive to God, to be attentive to how God is with people, circumstances and situations, and to call attention to God.  In fact, Teri reminded us that we are often called to step back and do nothing. By doing that, we can listen to the silence between the sounds and discern the Spirit, name God, and open our eye to adoration.

This is the eleventh year that I’ve come to Our Lady of Grace, sometimes as a participant of Women Touched by Grace, sometimes as an oblate, sometimes as a teacher of a Women Touched by Grace group.

Women Touched by Grace is an Eli Lilly Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Grant for women clergy.  I was blessed to be part of the first WTBG group which gathered seven times between 2003 and 2006.  As a result of my relationship with the (Benedictine) sisters of Our Lady of Grace Monastery (with whom we shared worship, prayer, and play), I became an oblate of the monastery which has brought me back to monastery at least once every year. The bonus has been that I have been asked to return to facilitate Women Touched by Grace sessions for the second, and now the third group.

I was scheduled to leave Houston early yesterday morning, but when I got to the airport they were looking for volunteers to fly out on the afternoon flight (the flight to Indy the night before had been cancelled, and there were a slew of people yearning to get home).  It was one of those rare times when I could actually take a later flight–so for waiting, I got a $500 travel voucher, a first class ticket on the 1 PM flight, and a morning in the first class lounge.  

My seat mate on the flight was a young mom who was holding her one year old daughter, just three months older than my grandson Jonas. It made for a bit of adventure, but how nice to be able to be a flight grandma for a couple of hours.

So now I’m at the monastery.   Lilacs are blooming.  I have a lovely small room in the guest quarters.  I’ve walked the labyrinth, prayed the morning office with the sisters, and already had holy rest.