A Time for Waking and a Time for Resting.

A blessing for all who need rest.

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Dear fellow pilgrim, and every one new to this cloistered space, welcome!

After our Passion Week Consolations, I felt exhausted.

It felt like the tension built up over those long months watching the world’s turmoils and walking through some personal health crises hit me with a hammer and left me looking for words.

So I searched for them on Easter Sunday by walking the gardens. While some lonely snow flakes still tumbled to the wet ground, I raked old leaves, just to discover new green peeking through the soil. The garden always gets me when religious forms fail. It invites me into a walking meditation and to drink deep from viriditas, the greening life force, as Hildegard has it, which permeates every living being.

The ground smelled of spring, birds sang and overnight buds had sprouted on bare branches.

And, I came across this photo from 5 years ago.

It felt fitting for what I was experiencing. Deep exhaustion like after a storm, like after having been cut open to deliver our child. But it also felt like being at an odd place of peace and calm. The one you feel after having birthed new life into being.

Thus birthing entails an important call for resting and retreating which is too often ignored. Laboring and birthing is a sacred process which should be followed by a sacred time of support, healing and resting.

I was fortunate that my husband granted me such deeply needed shelter for my recovering body and soul for the first 40 days after delivering our precious baby daughter. I stayed in our upstairs bed room with that little bundle of new life almost the entire time.

I cannot remember a more wholesome time in my life.

I think part of it was that I myself allowed myself to rest.
I gave myself permission to rejuvenate and to take the time needed before going the next step.

Being pregnant becomes heavy and burdensome on the last stretch, and then giving birth requires our all. It is no surprise that one needs time for healing and rest, too.

For this reason, birthing is such a powerful metaphor
for our spiritual journey.
We sometimes forget that birthing a new project,
a sacred insight, a holy anticipation of a next step,
can come with much hope
that is paired with exhaustion from the journey.

Therefore the scripture reminds us that everything has its time: the singing and the crying, the waking and the resting, the building of new things and the tearing down of the old.

The Benedictines have this wisdom interwoven in their day to day schedules, where the active life mingles with the contemplative life, and the work hours are met by the same amount of hours of retreating, praying and resting.

So where are you on your journey?

Are you in need of some rest from an exhausting project, or from walking through your personal passion week, carrying your cross?

Are you walking through an illness or caring for a loved one calling you more than before to rest and retreat?

Are you juggling work and family care and do not know where to find the precious hours for rest?

Are you suffering the spiritual overload of wanting to do too many good things at the same time?

Or perhaps, this time, you are the happy traveler filled with new energy looking forward to a rejuvenating Spring time?

Where ever you are, I wish you the wisdom, detachment, and possibility to find time for both: waking and resting.

Here is my blessing for you

When exhaustion from a journey

filled with

new hope and old sorrows,

has washed over you

like an unexpected wave

Welcome it at the door step.

It is an old friend

bringing wisdom:

it is good to not do

it is good to not be perfect

it is good to take time

it is good not to know the next step.

The infant child

sleeps from waking to waking.

Allow yourself to be

without plans.

Lean into the divine motherly embrace

and rest there for as long as you need.

Each task, every burden, every thing,

has its time.

Let eternity be

right now.

You have time.

time for what you need

the most.

May Divine wisdom guide you

and hold you

and bring you home.

Peace and blessings from my heart to yours, Almut (with Chuck and little one)

PS: If you can, leave a heart, a word or a line which resonated with you in the comments, so we know you have been here :-)

In case you missed it

Entering Passion week in a pained world.

Through the fire.

Cherishing what lies beneath.

About Almut

Almut Furchert, Dr. phil., Dipl. Psych. is a German American scholar and practitioner, a psychologist turned philosopher turned writer, traveler, photographer, retreat leader and mother of a pre-schooler. She has taught and published on authors like Kierkegaard, Buber, Frankl, Yalom, Edith Stein, and Hildegard of Bingen. Almut is also a Benedictine Oblate and lives with her family in a little college town in MN.

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