In autumn, a plastic cup came home with me. It is smooth, hard and beige. An unremarkable and utilitarian article, really, which rightly belongs in another cupboard; at the camp near my home, but I will let it linger in my cupboard one day longer.

While this cup has been temporarily detained in this house, I have cradled its comfortable weight in my hands. I have sucked tepid, brown tea water from the hollow below its rim. And I have used it to retrieve moments from the Grand Traverse Area Faith & Resistance Retreat, from whence it came. Even when the cup is empty &emdash; but for the microscopic gray chunks that float through my cupboard on household air currents &emdash; it is full. Full of a weekend in which I explored faith, sought a spirit to connect me to the big, beautiful ball beneath my feet and found strength in the resistance of things that harm Her.

In this way, my cup is plentiful.

The weekend retreat spanned the days of October numbered 13, 14 and 15. We, more than 100 souls from this state and others, gathered at Twin Lakes 4-H Camp " . . . on behalf of ecological health for the planet . . . "

We 100 or more souls gathered to celebrate the planet and to commune with the spirit that binds each one of us to it.

The reasons that brought us together are expansions of the ideals underlying the faith and resistance moment -- a positive force for change, which began in 1985 at Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church in Glenwood, Iowa. That first gathering brought " . . . clergy and laity from all religious traditions . . . together for liturgy, scripture, theology, nonviolence and resistance . . ."

And in our location, far from the flat fields of Iowa, we met. Catholic priest, Methodist pastor, a Zen practitioner or two. One of us had had the Dalai Lama's ear. Another had been awakened by the arms-akimbo moxie exhibited by woodland moss in winter. We were a congregation of variegated creeds and traditions, drawn together by the movement's aims, then dilated to reflect a reverence for Gaia.

Our sanctuary was a cloistered valley circled by a lush belt of flame trees. Maples burning gold and orange, this is my first memory of the weekend. Today, I believe the fleeting brilliant of those trees stood still long enough to remind me of the sacred subject at hand.

"Sometimes when the holy speaks it is heard by unlikely people," said Central Michigan University Chaplain Tom Jones after the first night's meal. We'd congregated in the camp lodge. He stood next to the fireplace and spoke to us, to me. Tom Jones's words seeped through a fissure in my mind, a mass of damp, doughy tissue that had been straining to locate, but only with the mind, the spirit in our Mother. Now, I am sure the holy spoke to me. In sheer ecstasy. How else does one explain the brilliant foliage that ringed the camp?

When Tom Jones's voice ceased, another replaced it. This one introduced us to the Council of All Beings, a ceremony planned for the second night. The council would draw beings not human to this room. But through our very human voices, the visiting assembly would bespeak -- most in accusing, angered tones -- the grievous human trespasses inflicted upon the natural world. Bob Russell, of the Neahtawanta Research and Education Center, entreated us to go off into the night and let the being we would represent, find us.

The Council -- described by Joanna Macy, John Seed, Pat Fleming and Arne Naess in their book, Thinking Like a Mountain -- is a ritual exercise. It asks its participants to defy the limits imposed from within and without. It seeks to restore a deadened nerve of empathy that once gave us the grace to walk softly on the earth.

When we become a conduit for other life forces, we begin to understand our connection to the web, and to believe unhesitatingly that no one lives outside its strands. John Seed calls it "passionate identification." On the next night, in a room lit only by fire, I heard the drumbeats and felt a new congregation shuffle in and claim the spaces among us.

I shared my mind and my voice with a manatee, and the manatee pleaded with a small circle of humans on the floor. She asked for salt waters free of the propellers that maim her parts and rend her flesh. The manatee was joined by an enraged wetland; fill me no more, she howled. And a sardonic crow; continue your stupidity, he taunted. I can adapt to the world you waste.

One hundred others came. They assailed our consumptive greed, our myopic penchant for the destruction of the source of all life. We were asked to remember who we really are. And Bob Russell spoke of a "rage too wild" for his throat to bear.

Thomas Gumbleton spoke of transforming rage when he uttered a simple sentence. The bishop from Detroit raised the question early in the morning of the Council, "Who can know what might happen when I protest?" Rage fuels our protest. And our protest, he said, is the spark of goodness, a spark of truth, a spark of God.

For as the weekend was about the earth, it was also about the spirit. The spirit with which we commune and to which we express our despair and celebration. Without the spirit, we are not with the Mother. She remains, somehow, only in our minds.

The spirit is not one intellect linking with another for purposes of cosmic betterment. Spirit is the sensing of an energetic force that is grander and greater than the standard-issue anthropocentric noodle can imagine. When we are full of the spirit, we bond to the natural world and cease betraying it. But for some of us, the spiritual link has been the hardest to forge.

Suspicion and cynicism have been my partners in an irritable circle I've danced around faith and spirit. Together they merged and appeared to me as the troubled, wrathful Capital G God about which I learned early and rejected posthaste. I came to the retreat hoping to raze that daunting facade, hoping to find new ways to understand the spirit and to experience faith.

Several paths were presented. I heard collared and professed Christians -- the crafters of that terrible God, I believed -- say that ". . . what we wear or what we chant . . ." is not a measure of our spiritual levels. Another held up "Jesus As a Role Model for Confronting Violence" and sang praises to resistance: "It is a very holy thing for me," said Peter Dougherty, a priest with the Lansing Diocese.

Later that day, I watched the fire laid by Jim Concannon and learned how a small flame in the earth, and sprigs of cedar to fuel it, produce a healing, soothing smoke. We stood as a group before it and let the fire elicit our secret prayers and silent songs. I felt warmth and quietly spoke my gratitude to the native people whose blood and traditions Jim Concannon shared. I thanked them for showing me ways to revere the earth.

This inchoate search for spirit has often left me vexed, if not perplexed by the mysteries of understanding. But in workshops, in conversations, even as I hunched over each of my three day's meals, I came closer to comprehending the complexities of my faith and easing the striving toward God.

Cognition breeds rebellion, though. Understanding brought rapture, thus my hesitancy to rejoin the world beyond that incendiary canopy of maple leaves. Some measure of this covetousness remains and is evidenced by heel-dragging reluctance to return the beige cup.

My beige cup. It is not truly mine -- this much wisdom I took from those few days at camp. I do not own anything; I coexist. Likewise, the beige cup is not the spiritual equivalent of an ash tray purloined from a weekend retreat to the Red Roof Inn.

The beige cup has been my focus when I need to recall. Staring into it I replay the retreat that helped calm a flickering mind. Staring into the cup, a poem comes back. A Buddhist, whose path merged too briefly with mine that weekend, gave it to me:

drinking

a bowl of green tea

i stopped the war*

Drinking a cup of tea from a beige cup, I learned faith.

* Paul Reps, Zen Telegrams

Return to the Index of Synapse 40, Summer 1997