Eat, Pray . . . Worry?

I always meant to be religious. But then I got busy. I got stressed. The recession happened and poof—there went the Sabbath. My day of rest was eclipsed by a motivation to work harder, longer hours than ever before.

Every now and again, I attend Mass at the Basilica of St. Mary. But more often, Sunday mornings are consumed by exercise, housework, and catch-up on career. Forget about prayer! I’m usually knocked out by day’s end, asleep soon after arriving home and within seconds of reaching my bed. An idle moment—while riding the bus, for example— often invites flickers of spiritual desire, but in general I am too overwhelmed to go searching for God.

So, as with many things, I resolve to pencil it in. I had read a few newspaper articles about the surging popularity of spiritual retreats at Zen centers and ashrams. Of course, I also read Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling Eat, Pray, Love. Like Gilbert and those other pilgrims, I crave a swath of unstructured time where my worldly tasks and concerns can finally fizzle—where I can escape the hectic workday, the endless to-do lists, the messy condo. But unlike Gilbert, I still feel attached to the Christianity into which I was born. I decide to make a reservation to visit Clare’s Well, a Franciscan Sisters’ spirituality farm and retreat center near Annandale, Minnesota.

Day One. I arrive at 9:30 am, already anxious to fill the idle days spread before me. I pull my car off a dusty road, drive as slowly and mindfully as possible, then park beside the nuns’ shabby farmhouse. Sister Carol Schmit greets me at the front door. The staff is in the midst of a meeting, she explains, so she hands me a jug filled with tap water and directs me toward my hermitage: the House of Francis, a small one-room cottage with no running water, situated a hundred yards or so from the farmhouse. “Lunch is at noon,” Sister Carol says. “See you at noon.” She can’t get rid of me fast enough.

Clare’s Well is a 40-acre “women’s spirituality farm” (though men are also welcome) with plentiful peaceful features: flower and vegetable gardens, chickens and doleful goats, wooded walking paths and a rustic labyrinth, bodywork services, and a tiny chapel for individual meditation and prayer. There’s even an on-site sweathouse, a structure typically used for purification in native spirituality. Three tiny hermitages (including one geodesic dome) provide guests with picture windows and comfy beds. But with zero Wi-Fi, spotty cell phone reception, and no one to keep me company, I’m not sure what to do with myself. I end up crashing for two hours in my hermitage, effectively wasting the rest of the morning until lunch. When I awake, I’m angry with myself—only three hours at Clare’s Well, and already I’m guilty of sloth.

Lunch is a simple meal of beef casserole, fresh salad, and thick slices of homemade bread. Seated at the table with me and Sister Carol are Sister Paula Pohlmann and Sister Jan Kilian plus a visiting 30-something woman who lives near St. Cloud and a college-aged intern who’s staying for the summer (she’s a peace studies major from St. Catherine University in St. Paul). Rather than saying grace, Sister Carol reads a passage on the 19th-century abolitionist Sojourner Truth and asks everyone to reflect on a similarly bold, truthful woman. Jan mentions those who openly oppose the Vatican by advocating for the ordination of women. Carol talks about the sisters who work in impoverished pockets of Mississippi and Louisiana. Me? After much hemming and hawing, I manage an unremarkable answer: my best friend Andrea, a teacher—she spoke boldly at her faculty meeting last year.

After lunch, I meet Sister Paula for a massage. We’re standing in her small workspace when she starts to explain that Sister Aggie Soenneker, cofounder of Clare’s Well in 1988 along with Carol, was trained as a massage therapist and practiced in this very room. Aggie died unexpectedly in December 2007, but Paula says she still feels her presence—especially in the vicinity of the massage table. “Aggie, what have you done here?” says Paula in exasperation when the stereo doesn’t cooperate with her New Age CD.

A little later, Paula asks: “Do you know what happens when we die?”

“No,” I say and laugh nervously.

“Me either,” she blurts. “But I know it’s very good.”

I have a confession to make: I’m not certain I’m Catholic. I spent my youth bouncing between houses of God, only to find I didn’t belong to any one of them. Lutheranism was too stoic, Unitarianism too convenient, Buddhism too close to the agnosticism I feared might swallow me whole. Now that I’m a little older, I accept the fact that I feel closest to home in the Catholic Church. But even so, I’m as curious as ever about alternative faiths. After dinner, I raid the nuns’ bookshelves and am happy to spot A Guide to Walking Meditation by the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh, a pocket-sized copy of the Tao Te Ching (the nuns have two translations to choose from), and A Timbered Choir, a book of restful Sabbath poems by Wendell Berry, a naturalist and unrelenting luddite. Berry was a favorite writer during my college years, but tonight, when I pick up his book, I read only a few stanzas before tossing it aside. I’ve no patience for his bucolic renderings! I’m grumpy. I’m lonely. I pull a blanket over my head and fall asleep before dusk.

Day Two. I’m really putting a dent in my sleep deficit. Twelve hours later, at 8 am, I wake up, visit the hermitage’s composting toilet, and fix breakfast: a generous serving of homemade oatmeal and fair-trade coffee provided by the nuns. Then I sink into a lawn chair near the hermitage’s picture window, where I can see cattle grazing the pasture of an adjacent farm.

By 10 am, I’m feeling the need to move, so I lace up my running shoes and slip out for a lope through the countryside. I feel vaguely embarrassed by my vain and frenetic exercise habits, so I attempt to escape unnoticed. I mosey past the barn and farmhouse. Once I arrive on the outskirts of the farm, at a clearing called Sacred Path, I know I am safely out of eyeshot. I consider warming up with yoga on the grassy patch, but I quickly think better of it—my Catholicism is so deeply entrenched, I’d feel bad about practicing Eastern traditions on the nuns’ sacred spot.

Four of Sister Carol’s cousins and her sister are visiting for lunch. It’s a lovely day, so she seats everyone on the back porch. While spooning up dishes of “rooster soup,” she explains that the farm’s rooster population has exploded in recent years. The hens were being terrorized, so the nuns slaughtered a half-dozen roosters a few days prior and stuffed them into the freezer. I’m having a terrific time chitchatting and amusing myself with thoughts of this rooster massacre when I rise to refill my teacup. Suddenly, Carol addresses me: “Dinner is at six,” she says. I’m not sure whether she wants to spend time alone with her relatives or wants to nudge me toward prayer and reflection. In any case, she’s clearly kicking me out.

I decide to practice Thich Nhat Hanh’s walking meditation. I grab his book on the subject and head for the nuns’ labyrinth, a half-mile loop that’s mowed into the prairie grass. I incorporate one of Hanh’s prescriptions: inhale, 3 steps; exhale, 4 steps. While doing this, I can’t help but prepare a mental list of the worries I’ll need to address when I return home: work responsibilities that accumulate in my absence, dwindling bank and retirement accounts, property value (or lack thereof), the boyfriend whose job necessitates travel for long stretches of weeks and months. But it’s also the rare instance when I quickly determine that these matters will wait, or resolve on their own.

It turns out I’m a typical Clare’s Well guest. When it began in 1988, Carol and Aggie envisioned it as a refuge for rural women who were suffering alienation and an affront to their way of life as the rotten economy forced their farmer husbands to assume second jobs. But those rural women never arrived. Instead, Clare’s Well became—and continues to be—a magnet for harried professionals from the Twin Cities and its suburbs.

In the evening, I wander the farm while reading passages from the Tao Te Ching. I first encountered this text years ago, as part of an Eastern philosophy class at the University of Minnesota. But my young brain hadn’t penetrated its abrupt, repetitive prose. Now it reads as easily as a young adult novel. “Do your work, then step back / The only path to serenity.” The passage sticks with me. I’m reminded of a different, more familiar text, one I find more powerful as a semi-practicing Catholic. Eager to compare notes, I head for the nuns’ tiny chapel, snatch a Bible, and flip to the Sermon on the Mount (particularly Matt. 6:25–29): “Don’t worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food, drink, and clothes. . . . Look at the lilies and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they.”

Day Three. I wake up craving the nuns’ tasty granola. I fix myself a hearty portion, brew enough free-trade coffee to undo all the good of the previous two days, and assume my perch before the picture window. When I revisit Wendell Berry, I’m able to comfortably digest all 200-some pages of poems. One couplet sticks with me in particular: “My tasks lie in their places / where I left them, asleep like cattle.”

At lunch, I ask Sisters Jan and Paula why they collect such disparate texts. Is it because they want guests to feel comfortable, no matter their religious identity? “I think they complement our Catholic faith,” answers Jan in her soft, sweet, unassuming voice.

Here’s where, finally, I uncover a nugget of truth from my amorphous retreat, though it’s not what I came for. I wanted the experience to ignite a deeper, more meaningful relationship with the divine, but what I end up with is an epiphany of the worldlier order. In my life, I fret so tirelessly that I can’t enjoy life’s blessings. What’s more, my anxieties only dull the focus and confidence I need to be productive and do good work. My spiritual advisors in this epiphany were many: the Bible, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Tao Te Ching, Wendell Berry, even Sister Carol, who forced me to keep my own company—perhaps the hardest thing of all. And this is what I hear them say: Stop worrying so much. Let it go.

Clare’s Well, $50 per day (includes meals), $50 for one-hour massage; 13537 47th St. NW, Annandale, Minn., 320- 274-3512, fslf.org/clareswell.html