The picture above shows you the wonderful sight which greeted me Monday morning as I peered through the dining room windows of Sinsinawa, which is a beautiful Dominican Retreat Center located amidst the rolling hills of Southwestern Wisconsin just outside of Dubuque. (For those of you from Racine, Sinsinawa is comparable to Racine’s Siena Center – minus Lake Michigan, of course, but gorgeous all the same.)
For the fifth or sixth time, I was there to provide music and worship resources for an event called The Grace Institute, which is led by a former prof of mine from Luther College, Brad Hansen. It’s designed as a series of three-day retreats for spiritual renewal and formation for both clergy and laypeople. . . and every two years a new cycle of retreats begins with a new group of fifty-some participants. They gather six times over two years for retreats – and I’m usually there for two of the six retreats. I put together the worship services (writing litanies, choosing scripture lessons, choosing hymns, and occasionally writing original music) and serve as the musical leader for them.
This has been one of the most meaningful and affirming experiences of my professional life – one of those sweet situations in which my particular gifts seem to be so very well suited for the matter at hand. If this were some big worship conference, and they were interested in organ/ brass fanfares, mass choirs, and a lot of high church pomp and circumstance, I wouldn’t be your man. But for something like this, calling for simpler and quieter worship, I seem to know what I’m doing.
It was especially sweet this time around to find that I knew three of the participants- a classmate from Luther, Dave Burling, that I have probably not seen in twenty five years – Kent Mechler, who as a high school senior stayed with Marshall and me and became a good buddy when he came to Luther as a student – and Marilyn Larsen, whose husband Bob was (and maybe still is, for all I know) head of the theater dept. at Luther. But beyond that were all kinds of other wonderful people I was meeting for the first time- profoundly spiritual, deeply appreciative people whom I was privileged to serve.
One of the interesting things about this gig is that I have a fair amount of free time between the six worship services, where I can compose music and work on other preparations – work on outside things as well – and maybe even take in The Simpsons Movie just for a rather drastic change of pace. I actually spent most of my down time working on a new hymn- “So is the Grace” – and did it at a Wendy’s because they have Light Lemonade and good lighting. 🙂 I’d already gotten the kernel of initial inspiration out at Sinsinawa, gazing out at the exquisite countryside- – – but it was at Wendy’s that I really hammered out the lyrics, smoothing out the clunky passages and bringing it to finished form. Oddly enough, it was also while watching some of the clientele coming through that restaurant (a bedraggled looking mom with an obnoxious little kid; a very elderly couple, both with walkers, etc.) that got me thinking about a couple of new images of God’s grace – and got me thinking about how God’s grace works not only in the serenity of a holy place like Sinsinawa, but also in the dirty, grimy, rocky, complicated world in which the rest of us live and work.
Anyway, it was a marvelous three days – – – three days without TV – – – without my refrigerator – – – without my opera videos – – – without Kathy – – – without the dogs – – – but marvelous all the same.