Poetry and Spirit II • October 14-16
NOTE: THIS RETREAT IS FILLED. WAIT LISTING AVAILABLE.

In our rationalized society, poetry has come to be the other language: language of the party that is always and happily out of office, language like a coiled spring, ready to burst forth from within and from below. Vertical language, the language of Spirit, of the All-at-Once, Poetry, its blade once sharpened, becomes a way of piercing the veil, the smogbank that shrouds reality, the container that keeps our lives under control – and much too small. Poetry, nearly a fugitive art today, has assumed like Christianity, in particularly intense moments of its history, the role of the prophetic stranger, the visitor from afar who brings in his old bag the keys to the genuine inside to the heart. The word –divine or human – is sacred, conceals within itself the fire of freedom and the secret of life.  Poetry, despite all its nonsense and often enough through its nonsense, when at its best will surprise us with a flash of insight that is feeling and life, that for the moment is plenty. The world needs that plenty. In the four retreat sessions, besides the talks, we shall read poems together, discuss them and reflect together on poetry today - its relation to spirituality, to Christianity, to life itself.

Bruno Barnhart has lived at the Hermitage, he will tell you, since just before the Crimean War. After concluding his service as Prior of the Big Sur community with the warm encouragement of his brothers he has devoted his efforts to the Christian sapiential (wisdom) tradition and its resurgence in our time. The Future of Wisdom: Toward a Rebirth of Sapiential Christianity was published by Continuum in 2007.