How (Not) to Prepare for a Retreat: Listening With Our Bodies in Prayer

By Margarita Mooney Clayton

This is the first post from The Way of Beauty’s most recent addition to the team, Margarita Mooney Clayton, who is an Associate Professor of in the Department of Practical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. She is also the founder and Executive Director of Scala Foundation. In this post she describes her experiences on a silent retreat at the Monastery of Bethlehem in the Catskill Mountains in New York State. She reflects on the distinctions between Christian contemplative prayer and the new-age and Eastern non-Christian forms of meditation that are so popular today.

Margarita writes.

Although I longed for a weekend of total silence, I was scared of that the retreat center I was heading to at the Monastery of Bethlehem in Livingston, NY  in the Catskill Mountains warned retreatants of the “austere” conditions they would find. Expecting a death-to-the-world, dark, cold, hungry three days, I spotted Five Guys and Fries off the interstate and stopped.

“Let me fill my belly now while I can,” I told myself. 

Greedily, I downed two patties and fries that only count as small because this is America, the land of the plenty. Not to mention I drank three diet cokes to top off my extra dose of morning coffee.

What awaited me, however, in my “cell of solitude” was nothing less than a two-story private chalet with a kitchenette, plentiful hot water and blankets, and a delicious home cooked meal every day, supplemented by practically limitless peanut butter, fruits, and cheese. I grabbed a small coffee maker from the shared supplies, mixing Starbucks Pumpkin Spice and Organic Arabica I found on the shelves. 

“This should be advertised as a Glamping Retreat, not an austere retreat,” I thought.

But I couldn’t find the inner peace I longed for. I set out for a hike, hoping to calm my jittery and achy body. So I set out for a hike. Nearly two hours later, I returned to the chalet of solitude with tired legs but eyes enriched by bountiful trees, changing leaves, a lake and birds. 

The previous day, in a class on aesthetics and Christian education, I had read about the body and liturgy with my students. In his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) explains that external activity of the body influences the internal disposition of the person.. Liturgy trains our bodies to surrender, to reorient ourselves to the resurrection. Our gestures, posture, and breathing all can help or hinder prayer.

One of my student’s questions resonated in my head: Why would God choose such a weak vessel—the human body—as a channel of grace? 

 I felt like Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love, who travels the world looking to satiate her appetites for food, meditation and romance. First she stuffs herself with great food in Italy before heading off to a silent meditation at an ashram in India. Unable to be silent, a fellow retreatant nicknames her “Groceries.” 

The groceries with which I stuffed my belly were a sign of my lack of inner peace. I couldn’t sit still as the sisters prayed the liturgy of the hours in the stone chapel adorned with magnificent icons. I knew my agitation was not only bodily, it was also spiritual.

But I wasn’t at a Hindu meditation center like the one Gilbert visited in India. Eastern forms of meditation with their roots in Hinduism or Buddhism have expanded in the United States, but they don’t offer what a Christian retreat center can offer.

Christian prayer and Eastern meditation may share an emphasis on stillness, but stillness of Christian prayer is not a sign of nothingness, it’s an awareness of an external being who loves us. The most important part of a Christian retreat is not what I do but what God does.

As a student had said in class, summarizing Ratzinger, the mystery of the incarnation is precisely that the eternal divinity took on flesh and blood. God took on human form, becoming man in Jesus Christ. 

We are made of dust, but made for communion with God. In my weakness, I can make an act of the will to go on a retreat, indicating a desire to surrender my burdens.  A priest of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal also visiting the retreat center let me break my silence and listened to an outpouring of my burdens. His main piece of advice was to forgive myself. God wants me to receive his love; he knows I’m not perfect but loves me anyway.

We all struggle with our vessels of clay, with our appetites that distract us from intimacy with God. But regardless, our bodies are an external sign of an inward state. Our bodies are an outward display of an inward truth. Our life with God is here and now, is bodily. Our communion with God is passive and active—we have to be still to hear his calls and respond. Christians seek stillness so as to enter into the dynamic receptivity of God’s love.

Glibert finishes her book finding love in Indonesia—a truly Hollywood ending full of bodily passion. Her story resonated with so many because we live in a time that people long for a spiritual journey that is quieting and filling at the same time. 

But the passionate love affair Gilbert describes in her book becomes her second marriage—and then her second divorce. 

Everyone struggles to maintain the human loves we so desire. Christianity tells us that we can’t sustain intimacy with others without intimacy with God, which is the key to intimacy with ourselves.

The very limitations of our bodies remind us that intimacy with God is not the result of kind of spiritual Gnosticism. Retreats are not heroic occasions of mystical encounters. 

Retreats are times to discipline the body, even at ‘glamping’ style retreat centers which offer solitude but also the beauty of liturgy, bountiful nature and wonderful food. God created the material world. We are called to redeem it. 

What we do with our bodies at retreats, and in everyday prayer and living, is part of that redemption. 

Stilling our bodies to receive God’s love is needed to experience the lasting the intimacy we all seek with others. It is because we have received that love that we can respond with our bodies, rejoicing in the goodness of creation. Our bodies humble us so that God can exalt us.

Margarita Mooney Clayton is an Associate Professor of in the Department of Practical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. She is also the founder and Executive Director of Scala Foundation whose mission is to restore meaning and purpose to American culture by focusing on the intersection of artists, liberal arts education, and religious worship.

The next Scala Foundation annual conference - Art, the Sacred, and the Common Good - takes place in Princeton, April 21, 2023 @ 4:00 pm - April 22, 2023 @ 5:00 pm EDT.

It is recommend to all Way of Beauty readers! I will be there [this is David Clayton writing!] moderating a dialogue between myself, Aidan Hart my old friend and teacher and one of the worlds leading iconographers; and the internationally known Canadian iconographer and podcaster Jonathan Pageau. Aidan is traveling from England to be with us at this event and I can’t wait to be part of it.

The Most Commonly Missed Mystery - the Mandorla of Our Lady Of Guadalupe and What It Tells Us About Culture

The story of the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe is remarkable in many ways. An important part of that story, that of the image that was given to Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin is itself enigmatic. What follows is personal speculation - I am describing what strikes me as so mysterious when I look at this image.

As a revealed image it is a rare Western example of a small category of sacred art called in Greek acheiropoieta - not made by human hands. In this example, we have some details clearly derived from Aztec culture and some from traditional Christian culture including some features not normally associated with the Spanish Christian culture of the day. Something else that is striking about this image is how these aspects are combined so as to create something that has great power to convince of the truth of what it conveys. This apparition caused millions to convert and a large part of that was due to the persuasive influence of the visual vocabulary employed by the 'artist' of this image. It spoke simultaneously to both the Aztecs and the occupying Spaniards. It continues to draw devotion today from Christians from all over the world.

The subject of this sacred image came up recently in a lively podcast in which I was in conversation with Christopher West (of the Cor Project and the Theology of the Body Institute). We were discussing the broader subject of the place of contemporary popular culture in a Christian culture and whether or not it has a place for Christians as a tool for evangelization. In the course of this we touched on subjects ranging from 1970s rock music (British, Irish and American) to Gregorian chant. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on YouTube, here).

In the course of this exploration, we spoke of how the liturgy is the wellspring of Christian culture and it is the culture of faith, connected to the liturgy, that is the strongest contributor to the universally human aspects of culture. In addition, this can be integrated discerningly with the contemporary culture so that it reflects a particular time and the place also. If this integration is done well the effect of the combination is to connect powerfully the universal truths to contemporary society; if on the other hand it is handled clumsily, it will have the opposite effect and will send people away from salvation.

As an example of such an integration that is successful, Christopher referred to the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe and spoke beautifully of some of those elements of the content that are particular to the culture (and of which I had not been fully aware before). So referring to this detail:

Our Lady's hairstyle, with the central parting, was in 16th-century Aztec culture the sign of a maiden, a virgin. The ribbon and bow around her waist signified that she was pregnant. So this is a young woman who is portrayed simultaneously a virgin and pregnant. And then the quatrefoil roses articulated in sepia lines on the pale brown-ochre shawl signify royalty. This is the visual vocabulary of Aztec culture.

But this image spoke to the Aztecs of more than their own culture because it has elements that come from traditional Christian culture too. These are universal in that they speak to all Christians (one might make an argument in some cases for non-Christians too). It is these that speak to 16th-century Spaniards and to many Christians from all over the world since.

We can see, for example, the blue shawl, a common color for Mary's outer robe. It is said to denote royalty and Marian chapels often have their walls painted in this color too. The exact shade of blue is unusual in that it is not lapis lazuli blue (French ultramarine), which a contemporary painter of the High Renaissance period might have used, but rather a turquoise blue often described as cerulean. I have no explanation for this difference. Also, I am curious to know more about the pigment that provides this color than Wikipedia can tell me -cerulean blue pigment is only known since the late 18th century when it was chemically created and it is not a naturally occurring mineral. It might be that there is no great mystery here and that it is an effect created by a simple combination of other, naturally occurring green and blue pigments available at the time.

The eight-pointed stars represent her connection with the 'eighth-day' of Creation, her Son, Jesus Christ who rose on the eighth day of the week. Traditionally in Eastern icons, there will be just three stars, symbolizing the perpetual virginity of the Theotokos - God-bearer - before, during and after her pregnancy. There are many more than three stars here. Perhaps it was deemed unnecessary by the Divine Artist to stay with three stars because the indication of virginity is indicated in a different way, as already mentioned. We not only stars but the moon, and this reveals a consistency with scripture in that it shows Our Lady as the woman of the Apocalypse, with the upturned crescent moon.

Another feature which interests me greatly is the nimbus of light around her. The account of the woman in the Book of the Apocalypse describes her as being 'clothed in the sun'. The golden nimbus around her whole person might correspond to this. However, this is more complicated, there is something else going on here I believe that relates to the symbolism of the mandorla.

A mandorla is an iconographic symbol in the shape of a circle or an almond-shaped oval signifying heaven, Divine Glory, or Light. Mandorla is Italian for "almond". It is an indication of the divine light of sanctity but the mandorla of this type is generally reserved for Christ, at least in traditional iconography. I suggest that its presence here is to indicate the presence of Christ within her womb. It is not there so much for the God-bearer, but for God! This is the Christian way of indicating the Our Lady is with child, the divine child which complements the visual symbolism of Aztec culture. Remember that if this image had not spoken to the Spanish occupiers too, none would have taken Juan Diego seriously.

Also, take a close look at the gold envelope that surrounds her. This is not, as one might first suspect, a series of bright gold darts emanating from Our Lady. Rather it is a series of dark darts emanating from her on a gold background, the outer limits of which describe the mandorla shape, which is a smooth almond. In other words, this mandorla is getting darker the closer it is to her. Why should this be?

She really is, to use a familiar phrase, a riddle wrapped up in an enigma!

The answer is that this is how it is painted in traditional iconography. As I wrote in a recent article on the subject: 'The mandorla surrounding Christ usually shows concentric bands of shading which get darker toward the center, rather than lighter. It is painted in this way so as to communicate to us, pictorially, the fact that we must pass through stages of increasing mystery in order to encounter the person of Jesus Christ. This encounter, which takes place in the Mass with the Eucharist at its heart, is one that transforms me supernaturally so that I can begin to grasp the glory of Christ more directly.'

You can see an iconographic mandorla here in the Dormition painted by Theophan the Greek in 1392:

In the following icon, the sense of a mandorla getting darker as it moves towards the center is portrayed in a different way:

As we can see above, the hidden 'heart of darkness' is suggested visually by darts of darkness that come from a point obscured by the figure of Christ. This is similar, but not identical to the device used by the artist in the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Notice also, incidentally, that while the apostles are able to perceive the glorified Christ they still do so dimly. They are partially and temporarily deified, but not fully and so are partially blinded by the Light and are knocked off their feet. To indicate this we see the rays that strike them as shafts of darkness, and the apostles themselves have no halos (in contrast with the prophets who flank Our Lord are already in heaven). They do not receive these until Pentecost.

It is interesting to note that virtually every copy of the Our Lady of Guadalupe icon gets this detail wrong and inverts the direction of the lines. For example, here is one painted around 1700:

Going back to the original, while the cherub does partially evoke in some ways those of Raphael in the art of High Renaissance Italy, it is not quite so sentimental as his, I would say, and the angel's wings are not of the fluffy white variety, but layered green blue, white and red, which again is common in traditional iconography and gothic art.

All of the constituent parts (including aspects not described here), both those particular to time and place and those that are universal combined to create a powerful force for persuasion. This being so, if we imagine for the moment that the artist is not divine, then we have indeed a remarkable mortal artist, one who is simultaneously aware of scripture, Christian artistic tradition going beyond 16th-century Spain, and Aztec culture. I suggest that someone of this profile would have been hard to find in Mexico in 1530!

To complicate matters further, there are the facts that have come to light as a consequence of scientific research of the image. These are things that could not have been known at the time. For example, there is an image reflected in the eye of Our Lady is of a room of people that corresponds to what was known about the people present when Juan Diego presented the image to his bishop. 

It is not obvious to anyone looking at it with the naked eye that there is even a reflection. Furthermore, I'm not sure how the hypothesis could make the transition into a theorem, which is what is necessary to constitute genuine scientific proof. Let suppose, for argument's sake, that the hypothesis is correct, then I suggest that this is a fact that was built into the image in order to convince skeptical 20th-century scientists and atheist materialists, but not 16th century Spaniards or Aztecs. You can make your own mind up on this one, here. For what it's worth, I am sceptical about this one. - I don't know how many computer algorithms it took to get the interpretation they were looking for.

In addition, we should consider the style of the image. Although it would never be mistaken for a Greek or Russian icon, it is nevertheless pretty much in accordance with the iconographic prototype. This would make sense theologically, for the iconographic style is the style of eschatological man. Our Lady is in glory in heaven and so it would be the most appropriate style for her to appear.

In accordance with the iconographic tradition, there is no strong cast shadow, the image is defined by line predominantly rather than tone. This is all the more remarkable. This is the period of the High Renaissance in Italy, which bears very little comparison to this stylistically. Spain did not take to this new style instantly and art of the period might have been more akin to northern Flemish art from the Spanish Netherlands and so stylistically closer to what we see here, nevertheless, I do not know of any other artist of the periods whose style is like this. It almost seems to be a new and unique style of iconography.

Again, if this was not a revealed image, then our artist aside from all else already mentioned is also a theologian of insight. He understood that the best artistic tradition to represent her should be iconographic, and then had sufficient familiarity with it to apply the principles of that tradition so as to create legitimate modifications of style that would make it more accessible to the local population, both Spanish and Aztec. In the case of the representation of the mandorla, this artist was seemingly more familiar with the iconographic prototype than many, at least, of his contemporaries  (judging from the flawed copies made of it by other artists) and this grasp of the underlying principles was so well understood that he was able to represent the nimbus getting darker in a unique way, without straying beyond the bounds of what constitutes the tradition.

If on the other hand, this is an authentic icon 'not made by human hands' and painted, so to speak, by the hand of God, then the remarkable degree of conformity to tradition, tells how authentic and true that tradition is. The iconographic tradition was developed by faithful Christians in the first centuries of the Church in order to communicate by visual means the truths of the eschaton. We must conclude that they were divinely inspired in their thinking to be so in conformity with this and all other acheiropoieta.

Whether we accept tradition and take it to be of the hand of God (and I do), or we believe it is the work of an artist of remarkable insight and inspiration, we have a wonderfully conceived and executed picture that participates in holy beauty.

Christ in the Realm of the Dead, by Joakim Skovgaard, 1891, 'the Danish William Blake'!

"Style and content are both critical if we are to portray the human form with dignity. It's not just what we paint, but how we paint it." "The Master of Sacred Arts program of www.Pontifex.University discusses in great depth how this consideration of the way in which we paint the human figure has influenced profoundly all the great Christian styles of art."

Here is the latest video presentation, by Bill Donaghy of the Theology of the Body Institute in Philadelphia, recorded just after the Easter Triduum last year. He discusses Christ in the Realm of the Dead, painted between 1891-94 painted by the Danish artist Joakim Skovgaard (1856-1933).

I did not know anything about this artist until I saw Bill's talk. Although not so obviously drawing on the Greek ideal, his style does remind me, in many ways, of William Blake. The dramatic touch in composition, the coloration look similar. And just like Blake he does not conform to the academic styles that dominated in the period that he painted.

While Christian artists are not bound to follow traditional styles (although I would argue they would need good reasons to depart from them) they must consider a style that has the right balance of naturalism and idealization. This is especially important when portraying the human form nude. Style and content are both critical if we are to portray the human form with dignity! It's not just what we paint, but how we paint it.This artist has created a work of great power without being prurient. He chooses poses that avoid revealing private parts - this is especially appropriate if portraying fallen man, for they are meant to be private in him more than in any other anthropological state. That is why we wear clothes - or we ought to -  in most situations!

The drama of this moment which indicates, as Bill tells us in his commentary, 'where Adam fails Christ succeeds'.

https://youtu.be/5l19GX6dls8

The Master of Sacred Arts program of www.Pontifex.University discusses in great depth how this consideration of the way in which we paint the human figure has influenced profoundly all the great Christian styles of art.

Pontifex University is an online university offering a Master’s Degree in Sacred Arts. For more information visit the website at www.pontifex.university

William Blake's Satan Watching The Caresses of Adam and Eve, by Bill Donaghy of the Theology of the Body Institute

A video commentary by Bill Donaghy of the Theology of the Body Institute, Here is the second in the series of 12 short videos on art by Bill Donaghy of the Theology of the Body Institute in Philadelphia. This week and next he discusses two paintings by William Blake the poet and artist. In this case, he discusses illustrations to Milton's Paradise Lost. First is Satan Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve.

At first glance, the art of Blake may seem a world apart from the grand fresco of Adam and God in the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. However, both draw on the ancient Greek ideal of the human form for inspiration. This can be seen if you compare the paintings in each case with any Venus or Hermes (as below)

This is appropriate to the subject matter and consistent with the ideas of John Paul II because he stated that in his view the Greek ideal might be the starting point for the art of the Theology of the Body.

Here is the video: https://youtu.be/SER00LywujY It was recorded in April last year and so the course that Bill refers to is past, but I would encourage people to look for courses in the coming year. His approach to art and beauty is fully in harmony with that of Pontifex University and my own Way of Beauty book.