For what is the mystical life but God coming to do what we cannot do? – Ruth Barrows, OCD
Dear Friends,
I hunch over my phone, obsessively tracking the progress of the Lyft drivers scheduled to arrive any minute at Cranaleith. The teenage girls and staff –now enroute to Cranaleith from IDAAY (Institute for the Development of African American Youth) in the West Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia– are participants in our violence intervention and prevention program that has been designed to provide respite from the ongoing trauma of gun-violence and is co-sponsored by our partner organization: WE/Women Empowered.
Once on site, the girls shyly enter the conference space, talking quietly to one another, sharing soft smiles. Sr. Maria welcomes each girl; Rasheeda (Community Engagement Coordinator) invites them to remember to “just be” during the long summer day.
Before lunch, in the shade of the patio outside the dining room, Jess, (Cranaleith’s Guest Services Coordinator, and recent graduate from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University), guides the girls through a process for creating cyanotype prints—using the bits and pieces of twigs and leaves the girls collect from the property, helping them create a collage of shapes and shadows. The fragile, treated paper –once exposed to light–activates a chemical reaction, revealing the unexpectedly beautiful outlines of those random bits of nature—now transformed into creamy silhouettes bright against the dark blue pages. Later, I see Jess working silently in the art room, intent on gluing the delicate art paper over the cardboard backs of the journals, anxious to piece them together in time for the girls to take their creations home.
At the end of the day, Tess Williams, the inspirational, accomplished leader of the retreat and Program Director for Cranaleith’s partner organization, Women Empowered, hands out the still slightly damp journals, asks the girls to describe their first day of the program. One girl shares that at first she thought the quiet of Cranaleith was “creepy,” but by day’s end she could feel the quiet in her mind—replacing her usual, racing thoughts. She found in the contemplative place a calming kind of stillness. It was a surprise, she says, something unexpected. The girl sitting next to her nods in recognition.
In his book Theory U: Leading From the Future as it Emerges, The Social Technology of Presencing, C. Otto Scharmer, Senior Lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management, describes a level of listening where we can’t express our experience in words, that “focuses on getting our (old) self out of the way in order to open a space, a clearing, that allows for a different sense of presence to manifest. You realize that you are no longer the same person you were…You have gone through a subtle but profound change. You have connected to a deeper source—to the source of who you really are and to a sense of why you are here.” Scharmer calls it the blind spot.
Here in the quiet of Cranaleith, if we look, each of us can see our collected outlines emerging on our dark blue, fragile paper. And each line? Breathtakingly beautiful.
In Mercy,
Dawn L. Hayward
Executive Director
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