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| Glenda Meakin Speaking at Spring Retreat |
The Ottawa meditation community’s annual spring retreat, held this year from March 27-29, 2009, drew a record-breaking crowd, with some traveling hundreds of kilometres to be there. It’s safe to say that had something to do with the weekend’s leader.
Rev. Glenda Meakin is a retired Anglican priest who has led retreats across Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. She is also the former national School coordinator and, as anyone who has had the good fortune to have worked with her at the School will know, she has an uncanny ability to make Scripture come alive and feel relevant to individuals today.
“Do we pick up our Bible and expect to be transformed?,” she challenged the group, suggesting that it is easy to become rather casual about “the great gift of Scripture.” It isn’t when she’s in the room.
An astute and gifted teacher, Glenda is frank and not afraid to deliver some hard truths. She explained early on that this retreat weekend was not about escape. The journey to our true self, we learned, involves seeing ourselves clearly and honestly.
“We are poor, insecure, wounded, and…we have put on a layer of certitude. We learn to hide our insecurities and woundedness very early.”
The underlying theme of her talks was openness; being willing to let go of our entrenched beliefs and ways of seeing the world in order to discover the treasure that lies within.
“This weekend we are on a journey home,” she told us. “Christian meditation is our means of transport.”
She explained that the problem is not that we are poor, wounded and insecure. The problem is that we deny it. As a result, we spend our lives constructing a false self that is tied up in doing, and in trying to fulfill the expectations of others.
“We try to cover our insecurity with power; with fame, with wealth…We spend so much time manufacturing our life that we don’t hear God calling us into the fullness of life… Meditation allows us to let go of our striving, our doing, our impressing, our pretending.”
She invited us to see ourselves in the person of the blind man whom Jesus heals in John, chapter 9. He had the humility to acknowledge that he needed help. She contrasted this with the Pharisees in the story, who are representative of our own metaphorical blindness and the need to admit that we may have things wrong. Doing so, she added, being willing to release our grip on our own certitude, is difficult and often frightening, but critical to our spiritual growth. Like the Pharisees, “when we can’t acknowledge our own blindness, we remain alienated from God… There is so much more for us to see but we have to admit we are not yet fully conscious, not yet fully open to the life we have been given.”
In letting go of all but the mantra, we can be open to what it is that God wants to show us about ourselves. She quoted John chapter 1, in which Jesus invites us to come and see where he dwells. In following this invitation, she said, there comes a journey of gradual awakening, of consciousness.
She also noted that there are hurdles to be faced along the way. One of the biggest, she says, is to accept the fact that God loves us just as we are. It is difficult to trust that who we really are is God’s beloved, she said.
“We can spend much of our life looking outside ourselves for answers because we cannot see what is right before us,” she added. Like the prodigal son, we can cover vast distances in our searching, and attempt to bury our pain in distractions. But Glenda noted that he finally found what he was looking for when he decided to go home.
It felt appropriate too, that in the latter days of Lent and as Holy Week drew nearer, she spoke to us about the importance of death and resurrection. If we can enter into the poverty of the mantra, and if we are willing to die to our false self, our ego self, there is resurrection and new life, she assured us. God loves us just as we are but God is also waiting to bring healing to the woundedness that we spend so much time and energy attempting to avoid.
“In meditation, Christ makes our poverty rich and our brokenness whole.”
Cathy Nobleman