Being Reborn Unarmed
In the Heart of Thailand
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the human heart conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9).
The trip to Thailand was a great gift for me, one I had not sought out. Several months after receiving an invitation to participate in it, I received a “second call.” Only then did I begin to think seriously about it, thanks, in part, to the full support of my community. Everything about my time in Thailand contributed to an intense spiritual experience that touched the innermost fibers of my being. I gave myself over to this dance of the Spirit, by whom I had allowed myself to be guided and led.
Before I left, a Zen monk who is a friend of our community told me, “Let yourself live!.” His words resonated with me several times during the different stages of the journey. Now that I have been back in my community for a few weeks and can reflect on everything that happened, I recognize that by simply living what Life was presenting to me moment by moment, without immediately being able or even wanting to understand what was happening within me, was one of the most precious (and perhaps even deeply desired) gifts that this experience gave me.
Of course, I cannot deny that before I left, I had some fears and worries, especially about the week-long meditation retreat at Camp Son, the central moment of the trip: so many hours of meditation, which was a new spiritual practice for me; a schedule that began very early in the day and was quite rigid; spartan and only essential accommodations; different times for meals and food I was not used to. On top of this was the fact that I do not know English. In short, there were plenty of reasons to be agitated and start thinking about surreptitious ways of getting around them.
Instead, right from the very first moment I stepped on Thai soil, and in every moment that followed, I had a strong sense of familiarity and welcome. It was as if I were in a place I had always known. Surprisingly, that was my experience even when we got to Camp Son! So all my fears naturally dissolved without any effort on my part.
To express what I experienced, I thought I would share the images that the meditation practice aroused in me. Better than words alone, images can make the richness, beauty, and depth of the transformation I experienced visible and more explicit.
The first image I received was that of a door. Meditation presented itself as a door that I could open to become more aware of my emotions and states of mind—those already known and those more hidden and partly unknown—so that I could try to change some parts of my life. When I opened this door, the many and manifold thoughts that were crowding my mind poured out, somewhat like an erupting volcano. It was not easy to look at them, name them, and then try to distance myself from them and let them go. Nonetheless, by continuing the practice I had a sense of great inner liberation.
The image that most completely describes my entire time in Thailand, both the days in Bangkok at the PIME fathers' mission and the week-long retreat at Camp Son, is that of a womb giving new life. The warmth of the welcome we received at the “House of Angels,” the creation of the Xaverian missionary Sister Angela Bertelli, the joyful liveliness of the boys and girls in the home established by the Saint Martin Foundation of the PIME missionaries, the strength of spirit and great dignity conveyed to me by the people I met in one of the slums of the Thai capital to which Father Daniele took us, were all encounters that gradually prepared me and opened my heart to make room for the experience to which the Spirit would lead me during the days of the retreat. The power of meditation together with the bare essentials of the setting in which we experienced it was for me a motherly womb of new and unexpected inner rebirth.
The possibility of putting up with unfamiliar and unexpected severe physical discomfort caused by this form of meditation was also a great life lesson for me, predisposed as I am to find ways of avoiding pain. I do not mean that I put up with pain by a heroic act of the will. I simply tried not to run away from it, and that brought me back to the central mystery of my Christian faith, namely the death and resurrection of Jesus. I experienced pain not as the last word and realized that it is possible to cross the over threshold when pain seems unbearable and come to a new and deeper awareness of self and a new life. In those moments I recalled the words that Saint Francis of Assisi spoke on the mountain of La Verna before receiving the stigmata: “Lord, grant that I may experience all the love and all the pain that you experienced.” The meditation hall was our burning bush.
Another aspect of the meditation experience that impressed me greatly relates to our having met and shared this time with monks and nuns, laymen, and laywomen of the Buddhist religion in a setting of strong mutual fraternity and welcome. Our experience was like a precious pearl set within the Word of God. In fact, on the second evening of our retreat at Camp Son, the director of the International Buddhist Studies College of Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University asked to meet with our small group of Catholic monks and nuns so that he could introduce us to the spirit with which we should practice meditation. When he talked about the importance of the breath, he referred to the Spirit that was breathed into Adam and Eve. Then on the last day, a few hours before we left, a Buddhist laywoman who had always meditated sitting next to us nuns gave us a small bag with sweets and a handwritten note with a quote from Saint Paul's Letter to the Romans, “May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus” (Rom. 15:5).
Encounters with other faiths can be a way of returning to one's faith and coming to a deeper understanding of that faith, doing so with the help of the Spirit, who is the secret protagonist of all human journeys of faith.
Translated by William Skudlarek
