an invitation to a renewing
saturday retreat
An Integrated Approach to Healing & Wholeness
Participating in a MYSTIC RHODE retreat invites you to integrate the conscious and unconscious dimensions of your life. The Rhode Island context offers an evocative symbolic structure for this integration to occur.
Four aspects of Rhode Island’s past and present — the wilderness, the ocean, the seasons, and the sunrise — serve as metaphors to help you understand your life in freeing and empowering ways.
Each retreat creates an intentional container for our personal evolution. We listen to our hearts and to the hearts of the other participants. At the same time, we listen to our religious traditions, to the wonders of nature, and to the timeless biographies of Rhode Island’s founders. Through this process, we receive unexpected gifts of grace to guide and sustain us.
the wilderness
All of us experience emotional barrenness. Most often, we muddle through these times by developing a patchwork of coping skills. We persevere by sheer force of will, while unconsciously sacrificing our joy and larger sense of purpose to the tyranny of the urgent.
The Rhode Island story provides a powerful alternative. The state came into being out of the wilderness experiences of Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and many other early settlers. Even more, the story intersected with an indigenous culture that thrived in the wilderness for thousands of years.
Similarly, both Judaism and Christianity contain powerful dramas of barrenness — so much so that the wilderness experiences of the Israelites and Jesus played critical roles in inspiring these religious movements.
Such examples tell us that we don’t have to face our emotional barrenness alone. We can rediscover the wilderness as a place of spiritual potential and surprising grace.
the ocean
There’s a saying that some Rhode Islanders display on sweatshirts, mugs, and bumper stickers: SALT WATER HEALS EVERYTHING. Although the statement is made in jest, it contains an important truth.
The ocean is a symbol of God and of the unconscious. The more we become aware of these profound maritime associations, the more we will find the meaning and purpose of our lives.
The ocean is too wide to see across and too deep to fathom, yet when we stand on a beach or in a boat, we imagine expeditions to faraway lands and sunken treasures. This is why the early colonists are our soulmates. They came to these shores on small ships and endured terrifying voyages in order to seek their fortunes and begin their lives anew.
The Bible also teems with dramas involving the sea. Pondering these narratives from vantage points along Rhode Island’s Atlantic shore or Narragansett Bay is like a homecoming for the soul. In the mystic vision of the Ocean State, no journey to the sea goes unrewarded. We always return cleansed, challenged, and changed.
the seasons
No region of the country is better known for its dramatic seasons than New England, and Rhode Island is at the heart of it all. In this magical place, we listen to God and nature with our souls, but often at a level beyond our conscious awareness.
Each season is an incomparable spiritual teacher. The cycle of nature instructs us about birth, growth, maturity, aging, death, and the inevitability of change.
Sadly, most of us don’t benefit fully from these lessons because we haven’t learned how to live in rhythm with nature. Taking the time to do this work, in order to recalibrate our lives in alignment with the undergirding seasonal structure of life, is a radical act of self-love.
In this process, the early colonists are also our teachers. They lived off the land, so their very survival depended on their sensitivity to the rhythms and movements of nature. This orientation harkens back to the biblical vision of Eden, where humanity and nature lived in harmony, to their mutual benefit.
Meditating on these truths with a group of likeminded seekers is the first step toward realigning our hearts toward wellness and abundant life.
the sunrise
On a clear day, viewing a sunrise in Rhode Island is like glimpsing the horizon between heaven and earth. The state’s strategic eastern location, conducive atmospheric conditions, and four-hundred and thirty miles of coastline create breathtaking prisms of color and light.
Symbolically, beyond the majestic rainbow displays of nature’s artistry, each daybreak is utterly unrepeatable, like each human life. This symbolic richness deepens when we think of the masculine sky uniting with the feminine sea, or of darkness integrating with light, or of great things starting small and then growing in magnitude and influence over time.
The natural lessons go on. And yet one particularly powerful message of daybreak in Rhode Island stands out. Every single sunrise, no matter how flamboyant or muted, redramatizes the timeless vision of soul liberty that came into being here and became part of the founding documents of the United States. With the first burst of light on the Rhode Island shore, a new day for freedom dawns. It begins here and spreads across the land.
When we associate these deeper meanings with the sunrise, we increase the possibility that our experience of daybreak in Rhode Island will grow mystical, which is another word for life-changing.