I hope you will answer this question
“Where’s Your Cave?” after reading this post by clicking on “comments” on the
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In
his autobiography, Paramahansa Yogananda tells of his childhood and adolescent
attempts to escape from Calcutta to the Himalayas to find a guru in a cave and
pursue a spiritual path. Even after he has found his primary guru years later,
he leaves him and his hermitage near Calcutta to seek out another guru in the
mountains, one who humorously chides, “Masters are under no cosmic compulsion
to live on mountains only.”
This
guru asks, “Are you able to have a little room where you can close the door and
be alone?” When Yogananda affirms, “Yes,” the guru says, “That is your cave.
That is your sacred mountain. That is where you will find the kingdom of God.”
It
reminded me of the psalm that begins “I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where
will my help come?” (Ps 121) One of my earliest encounters with biblical
scholarship was discovering that there should be a period, dash, or semicolon
after hills, because the psalmist is not affirming mountains as God’s habitat,
but rather, rejecting hills where other gods were worshiped. The psalmist
instead affirms in the verse that follows, “my help comes from Yahweh who made
heaven and earth.”
Elijah
heard God speak in a cave’s sheer silence on Mount Horeb, and Mohammad had his
divine revelations in a cave. Jesus preferred “lonely places” to pray, sometimes
mountains, and encouraged us to find an innermost room, or pantry, to pray. A
Bodhi tree was sufficient for the Buddha. We all need our “caves,” our “set
apart” places to be “close to the mystery, [while] never solving it,” in words
from Deepak Chopra’s novel Muhammad.
In
all the places I have lived or visited, I have found a “cave,” often outside
and usually with a view of the outside, to pray. In addition, two places to
which I have longed to return each served as a cave away from home, Mt. Calvary
Retreat House above Santa Barbara, destroyed in the Montecito fire a few years
back, and the shoreline, which I rarely get to these days living in Atlanta. (I
was once astounded to visit a church on a perch with a beautiful view of the
sea purposely constructed with no clear windows so as not to distract
worshipers!)
I’ve
written before of Etty Hillesum, who, facing transport to Nazi concentration
camps, wrote in her diary (published as An
Interrupted Life), “There will always be a small patch of sky above, and
there will always be enough space to fold two hands in prayer.”
“Somewhere
inside me,” she wrote, “the jasmine continues to blossom undisturbed, just as
profusely and delicately as ever it did. And it spreads its scent round the
House in which You dwell, oh God.”
Kirkridge is a welcoming “cave” which
hosts an annual retreat for gay and bisexual men (scroll down to date after
clicking), which I will be co-leading Oct 3-6 this year with Roman Catholic
activist and filmmaker Brendan Fay. Register by Aug 31 and subtract a $50
discount, no code required!
Progressive
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More on Etty Hillesum:
Books that line the
walls of my working cave:
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Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of
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