Safety and Freedom
After a week in the French Alps with my youngest son, where he skied and I wrote, and together we had deep conversations about truth, I discover monastic life in Provence. First, I spent four days with Dominican sisters, who sang very beautifully, and today I have arrived at Cistercian monks, who don't sing as beautifully but have an abbey in a dizzying domain, surrounded by pristine nature, bathed in Provençal sunlight. I feel like I'm in a book by Dan Brown.
Being a guest in a monastery is very conducive to enjoying silence and nature, being alone yet not entirely, and observing how these sisters and brothers experience their spirituality. I cannot advocate for the dogmatism of the Catholic Church, but I am moved by the dedication of the monks and nuns. The radical choice they make. They renounce a worldly life and exist solely for their dedication to God. The Cistercians here begin vigils at 4 a.m. and then come together six more times in the church, the last time at 8 p.m. Every day, year after year, they sing for God.
With the sisters, I heard that they also prayed for freedom. They didn't say it, but I think it's about spiritual freedom, being detached from worldly desires and personal pettiness.
In the silence of monastic life and during my walks, I reflected on the connection - and contradiction - between safety and freedom. I believe that many spiritual seekers, myself included, become seekers because they are looking for safety. Through traumatic experiences, we have learned that this world is not safe. We have begun to search for a reality that is not changeable, for what remains when everything that can provide security, all the worldly, falls away. An ultimate, formless reality. The actual reality, underlying the assumed reality. I call it our true nature, or Love.
To experience our true nature, we need freedom, a state of being in which we are not attached to stories about ourselves, to certainty about the future, to aknowledgement from other people. We are free in every moment to let go and be let go. We are willing to lose everything, after all, what remains is what we actually want to experience, our true nature.
The brothers and sisters I see here have their way of letting go, of distancing themselves from a personal life, a story to identify with. I want to be at least as radical in the choice I make for freedom, but I would rather be tested by a life in the world, challenged where I am not yet free, examine conditionings that have arisen from trauma, and continually land in being nobody, on the wings of surrender and trust. This moment is all there is. And most of the time it feels like a dance of love and beauty.
For anyone who wants to retreat in a French monastery: ritrit.fr
For anyone who wants to retreat with me: retreats
Love, Zoë
Abbaye d’Aiguebelle
