These notes were written by Andrew Rockell, who initiated and developed the contemplative services at Cityside.
The contemplative services took three different formats:
a) Micro-Pause/Nano-retreats: First Saturday of each month. Two sessions. People choose one. First session at 8 am for 1 and 1/2 hours; second option at 10 am for 1 and 1/2 hours. Occasionally some people choose to do both. Not very often though.
b) ‘Silence’: 1 hour on a Wednesday morning at the church, from 7am-8am. No structure but the time. Some photocopied centering texts and icons available in a box; a sand-tray with candles and incense in the middle of the room. People come and go as they please.
c) Contemplative workshops: We only did 2 or 3 at random. There wasn’t enough of a ground-swell to keep them going.
The basic structure for the Nano-retreats was:
- Leader’s remarks.
- An opening liturgy, which I developed for Cityside out of some early church and non-canonical materials. The materials dealt with some aspect of the kind of exercises we’d be doing; followed the structure of the retreat; and were deliberately ‘fringe’. They included elements of the Christian tradition a little beyond the pale, working on the analogy of opening up previously ‘forbidden’ areas of the psyche within the individual or Christendom at large.
- Zazen: Classical Zen Buddhist breathing exercise. This just to get people to calm down and focus, and drop down a gear or two mentally. I worked consistently at demystifying this and taking the ‘spooky’ out of it. It’s a very practical, matter-of-fact exercise and, I have found, the absolute best possible introduction to people starting to take the incarnation seriously. The extraordinary thing about Zen is on one hand, Zennies’ willingness to have their practice used in support of other religions and, on the other, the commonness of the experience that when people from religions other than Buddhist use Zen techniques they tend to find themselves with greater mental access to and groundedness in the religion they began with (compare all the Jewish Rabbi stories about going into Zen and ending up deeper into Judaism).
- Object-exercise: like the St. Francis exercise with small rocks. Attention practice.
- Body-prayer: Contemplation taking the whole body into perception. The most explicitly ‘incarnational’ exercise, it is also, weirdly, the most threatening to people. Westerners don’t tend to live in their bodies; Protestants least of all; and Baptists even less.
- Word meditation: centering texts; or a Christian mantra exercise.
- Icon meditation: colour photocopies, laminated, of some famous Christian paintings (e.g. by Hildegard of Bingen); some black and white photocopies in plastic slips of Christian mandalas etc.
- Zazen again, to decompress.
- Closing liturgy. Again, something I’d put together out of early church and non-canonical texts.
The major movement of the retreat was circular, beginning with a liturgy and zazen and ending with zazen and then the liturgy. The center of the movement was in the middle of the retreat with the body prayer. If I’d continued my involvement with the retreats I’d have included a centre-piece liturgy as well.
I structured the retreats on the model of the Labyrinth. The retreats do in time what the labyrinths do in space: move in to a centre and then move back out.
The type of material is mostly via positiva stuff. That is, exercises that are not about self-reflection or ‘retreat’ from the world (via negativa). The exercises I chose and worked up deliberately gave people no time to think (i.e. ‘turn in’ on themselves). They are pretty much all about focusing on an object or word or something in the present here and now and continually bringing their attention back to that.
The retreats and workshops were introduced to the congregation by means of a bit of informal polling first; a letter I’d written to Mark Pierson about the whole issue became a sort of ‘open letter’ I forwarded onto others by way of explanation; announcements in morning services and church newsletter; creation of an email group; and converting sections of the Cityside roster that I was on during services into short contemplative moments. Most importantly, I held an opening contemplative workshop where I got to explain some of the techniques, how they work, and what they’re doing and, crucially, to trouble-shoot anxieties — ‘Will this open me up to demons?’ etc.
I just launched straight into the hot-potato issues and got them out of the way as quickly as possible. I decided that being as candid as possible would be the best option. So, at the church AGM when the chair asked me about the retreats I deliberately threw in the fact that some people had found aspects of the retreats threatening; reasons why they might have done so; the fact that I had talked through some of the possible issues with two of the psychoanalysts associated with Cityside; what the psychoanalysts had recommended in terms of ‘containing’ things for people; and the fact that the kinds of things the psychoanalysts had recommended were in fact already part of the nature of the meditations themselves.
There is a lot of stigma attached to meditation in the Christian world, so I thought the best process was to take things as much as possible out of the ‘shadows’ so people could see that they were getting as much key information as possible. And, basically, I was working on a 5-year plan. I really didn’t expect many people at all to turn up to anything in the first year. And if no-one had that would have been fine. I was looking at contemplation starting to permeate Cityside consciousness only very slowly and that the fact that stuff was happening would be enough, even if people didn’t attend.
This permeation has in fact been happening. In a morning service at the end of last year one woman performed a song she’d written about the retreats even though she hadn’t been to one. In fact, the song was about not getting to the retreats! Lovely moment. And fascinating for evidence of the fact that the idea of contemplation is something people are gradually making friends with even if they never get to it. So, sort of consciousness raising even at quite peripheral levels. It’s enough of an achievement (for me) just to know that people are even thinking about it without panic or reaction.