Every Day a Jubilee

You shall have the trumpet sounded loud ....
You shall hallow the fiftieth year ....
You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land ....
It shall be a jubilee for you.
~Leviticus 25:9-10

I must confess that New Year's has never been much of a holiday for me. I do remember whooping it up with some other young friends as we tromped around Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus one exquisite New Year's Eve in dear old London, and I spent one exceptional New Year's day hiking in a forest near the Eno River in Durham, N.C. with the woman that I would one day marry, Joyce. With those exceptions, New Year's had mostly been humdrum affairs for me until the year before last.

You may remember that year before last was the year, 2000, the beginning of the millennium for most people. Joyce and I were looking for something extraordinary to do for this special year when we received an invitation from the Sisters of St. Francis at the Franciscan Renewal Center in Portland, Oregon to attend their Millennium celebration. Though this center is associated with the Roman Catholic Church, it is decidedly ecumenical in its orientation.

We had become acquainted with the Sisters, as over the years we had both spent time communing with our spirits on personal retreats at the center. We had enjoyed meditating, reading from their excellent library and walking among the beautiful forests, meadows and orchards on the the grounds. I first became acquainted with Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, while on a retreat there. I also read much of the life of St. Francis of Assisi while sitting in the library looking occasionally out the tall, Romanesque windows onto towering fir and hemlock trees.

Upon reading their invitation, we saw that we would spend New Year's Eve participating in various spiritual activities, sampling refreshments and would also spend the night in one of their retreat rooms. We could look forward to a brunch on New Year's Day. Somehow, it seemed to us like a perfect way to end one millennium and begin another.

Well, the stay was a great success! One of the first things that we did was to make prayer shawls using strips of white cloth and paints. Mine had lots of curvilinear designs while Joyce's, was more linear. These shawls helped create a sense of personal sacred space.

We also walked a maze that had been set up in one room. I do not know if you have tried this ancient spiritual technique used by pilgrims of various religious persuasions all over the world, but as one walks the complex maze one symbolically approaches closer and closer to God or the true self.

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