Chapter Twelve

TEA RETREATS

Slow Tea

On retreats, bring everything needed to make slow tea. It’s as important as a journal or good book. If you don’t prepare what you need to make tea ahead of time, you will be stuck with stale tea bags that have been sitting by the coffeepot for a couple of years. The people who run the retreat will tell you it’s because no one drinks tea. My feeling is that if we offered tea as it was intended, everyone would drink it.

Tea for Retreats

Take a small tea strainer and a nonbreakable metal thermos. Pack teas that carry the following purpose and great flavor:

Two floral or lotus teas that take about 20 minutes to unfold. These are perfect for meditation times as they unfold in the same amount of time people usually sit for a meditation.

Chai that has a bit of spice to bring you into awareness and appreciation for the whole wonder of creation.

Herbal teas with lavender or chamomile to carry with you for peace.

A nice green tea to use daily as a ritual for opening your mind to new thoughts.

WHEN YOU RETREAT EITHER to the mountains in Tennessee or some exotic place, tea is a quiet companion. The thin, dried leaves speak of a patience that waits for the time when we are ready to pour the water and drink. Retreat and tea are like peanut butter and jelly or, better yet, like word and deed. You can imagine the rising of a new thought as you take a sip of tea in front of a fire or in a sacred quiet space. James Norwood Pratt, a notable tea professional, wrote this about tea: “an elixir of sobriety and wakeful tranquility, tea was also a means of spiritual refreshment and the ritual of preparing and partaking of it was an occasion for spiritual conviviality, a way to go beyond this world and enter a realm apart.”19 Taking tea to retreat has been a practice since the tea masters perfected the tea ceremony to be a path of enlightenment and a way of being in itself.

Going on retreat is not pulling away from the good fight; it’s a brave act to step back and assess where we are and gather strength for the journey ahead. Retreat is the period our souls long for, to look to the mountains for our strength and wait like the bridegroom for his bride. This is respite, the place we see visions and the wilderness where we wrestle with ourselves. I love the image in the Gospels of the disciples going to a lonely place to find time to focus and talk with their teacher alone. They had to get away from the crowds, not because they didn’t love them but so they could love them more.

I packed up bags of thistle seed, cardamom, wild ginger, cinnamon sticks, black and green tea leaves, some lotus tea blossoms, ginger, and lavender, and headed out. One of the scary parts of retreating is that everything keeps going on without you. It’s humbling and freeing in the same breath. Construction had begun on the café, and the women had even started training. We can step aside for retreat and the world doesn’t miss a second in its orbit. Just when we think we are indispensable, we are reminded that we are not. But while retreats are humbling in that way, they also honor those duties and tasks, as they give us a chance to renew our strength and energy to do our work better.

I need to go away to the mountains for a few days, regain my grounding, and come back with a renewed sense of energy. This retreat is like peeling back enough layers of busyness to get to the heart of the matter, and tea will help take those layers off with grace. Since the days when Lu Yu and the other tea fathers first recognized that tea was a spiritual companion to bring calm and awareness to the heart, tea has been carried by monks and religious guides. Tea can be a consciousness-altering agent that brings us back to our center. It can help settle us long enough to be stirred into the awareness that is necessary in retreat.

I was going on this retreat because it felt like it would be a safe place to cry with my creator. I took my grieving heart on retreat and finally had the time to remember all the details of my sister that I was afraid would slip away. I remembered all the times she drove us to the mall when our mom was working. How she could blow smoke rings inside other smoke rings, how she did crosswords in pen, and how she loved family. Time slowed down enough for me to take her death in and honor her with memory. People can retreat to focus on resolutions, gain the necessary insight to see a vision through, or simply to rest and feel the power of silence.

Getting there and coming back are bookends that make being on retreat difficult to undertake. Letting our schedules go and removing ourselves is hard to do. Coming back from a period of deep contemplation and stepping back into our lives is even more difficult. We want to hold on to the vision of the mountains and not get bogged down like we were just days before. When I left the cabin sated by tears and tea, I didn’t want to jump back into work. Instead of getting back into the swing of things, what I wanted to do was stay in the mountains with the memories of my sister. I could stay another few days and stretch out on the cabin couch with a comforter tucked in close and watch the flames in the fireplace dance. The longing to stay made me feel like I was sitting by James and John and Peter, the disciples, when they asked Jesus to let them stay in the mountains after the transfiguration. They wanted to build a shrine away from the outside world and live with the beauty of dazzling heavenly light. That feeling of wanting to stay on the mountaintop is not hard for us to grasp. This world is hard. We want to stay in that place where we may get a glimpse of Elijah and Moses and the people we love who have died. We want to stay in the safety and beauty of a mountain. Maybe get a glimpse of the back of God’s head, like Moses on Sinai. I’ll take that. There is this sense that if you are in the mountains, you are apart from this world—that it can’t affect you. That you are going to be safe there.

Retreats, though, should remind us that we can be the same person on the mountaintop as we are in the valley of work. We are the same person in the lofty cathedrals of inspiration as we are when we are plodding through the dark corners of our doubts. We only have one life. When Jesus talks about heaven and divine things in the kingdom of God, He doesn’t talk about veiled truths that we can never understand. He talks about earthly, simple things like a treasure in a field, a pearl of great value, sowing seeds, or taking dirt and spit and loving someone enough to put it on their eyes to heal them. These earthly images give us a glimpse of heaven. Retreats are not places to reinvent ourselves or pretend we are holier than we actually are. They are places to recollect ourselves so that we can live and not get weary from all the work there is to do.

The story of the transfiguration reminds us that before, during, and after their retreat, the disciples were the same; they just became more themselves. Part of the point of that story is to remind us that heaven is no more in the mountains than it is in the valleys. Retreats can be the bridge between having our heads in the clouds and our feet on the ground walking toward justice. We can be inspired on the mountain, but all inspiration fades without action, no matter how vivid the dream.

The call to retreat is in part a call to remember and to return. The most inspired retreats will fade unless we go back into our lives and live out the call to love right here, with each other. Our actions are love made manifest. Retreats make a piece of heaven feel like a reality on this earth and make this earth a little closer to heaven. We are reminded during the mountaintop experience what a gift all of life is. And everything we do with our stewardship, time, and talents shows our gratitude for that gift. I am so grateful that God doesn’t leave us on that mountain no matter how badly we want to stay. Can you imagine when Peter, James, and John whispered in Jesus’ ear: Let’s stay in this beautiful place; the authorities will never find us up here. Let’s stay where we have visions of those we love who have died. We don’t have to leave; we don’t have to walk toward our death. Jesus reminds them that’s not what love is about. It’s not where we are headed. If we get off the mountain, maybe we can help our communities look a little bit more like heaven.

Sometimes the places of retreat can catch us by surprise. Around this same time, I preached at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. I arrived early to get a sense of the place; walking in felt like entering Oz. The vaulted ceiling, mural walls, priceless artwork, and stained glass illuminated by hallowed light felt like refuge. I noticed a beautiful sculpture of a mother and child with small candles underneath that could be lit for a donation. As I read the plaque under the statue and how it was given in memory of a beautiful mother, I remembered that we also retreat to heal. We go to heal ourselves so we are able to be the light we are called to be in this world. I felt healed simply by being in that cathedral. I just sat in quiet prayer and awe and let myself heal a bit in the small enclave with an image of the Madonna and child.

This surprise mini-retreat continued as I met the dean of one of the most beautiful cathedrals in North America. Dr. Jane Shaw hails from England and was a professor at Oxford in history for sixteen years prior to coming to the cathedral. The first thing she did was buy me a cup of tea and tell me a few stories about the teahouses in Oxford. I loved that she knew tea, that she knew how to use it as a sign of hospitality and safety, and that she was as grounded as she was intelligent and funny. We became fast friends as she lifted me out of my sadness with Earl Grey and a lilting accent. A good sign that you are in retreat mode is when conversations drift and there is no urgency to get back on task. Retreat language is open-ended and nonjudgmental. It is language that contains hope. The surprise morning retreat carried me from an anxious state through a moment of grief, a touch of healing, respite, and hospitality in the form of tea, to an altar that offers us a place to commune with the eternal.

Our mornings could become mini-retreats if we approached them with sincere hearts and knowledge of our need for healing. While most of us would love to be able to go to the mountains in Jackson Hole or the sacred shrines of Europe or follow holy roads in Spain, sometimes we make retreat wherever we are and with whatever tools we have. That kind of surprise retreat reminds us that we don’t always get to choose when we retreat or grieve. Sometimes grief grabs us as we try to hold pain close to our chests. It waits and meets us around a lonely corner and takes us down. Grief can weary any body as it curls up next to us at night and visits our dreams with strange twists that pull us back to childhood. And so we need morning retreats that give us a break even in the midst of busy days. As I am trying to walk this path of professional fundraiser, entrepreneur, and priest alongside grieving sister, my mantra has been walk slow, be gentle, and when you get a chance, head to the hills.

After that morning in the cathedral, I found another surprise retreat on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. As I stood near a pier in the fog, gazing over the water, I thought about how far water will carry us if we are willing to travel out to sea. We are heading from the mountains to the sea and someday will make our way to an ocean that will carry us back to God. Ultimately, retreat is remembering that truth. I sipped tea and sat at the pier with the steam rising from my cup merging into the thick fog, and believed for the first time in weeks that my sister was well. Retreating on a wing and a prayer to our hearts is one of the greatest spiritual gifts we can access. Cultivating that gift has been a practice for centuries in the spiritual life. Take a cup, go on retreat, and carry that peace back into the crazy world. That peace is older than the tea you are sipping and any problems you are facing. Retreating is the gift we have been given to move ahead.