I was scheduled to graduate from Villanova University in May 1979. I was a business major and near the top of my class grade-wise, and I had spent months interviewing with Wall Street firms. But I had this nagging sense that for at least a short period of time I wanted to do something meaningful, knowing that Wall Street would always be there for me later.
So I joined the Peace Corps. They assigned me to Guatemala, and, by total coincidence, one of my classmates, Tim Clarke, applied and was assigned there as well. We decided we’d go together, one month after graduation.
We flew to Guatemala with about 40 other volunteers for the two year commitment. We were served a meal that was not prepared properly, and everyone started becoming ill. Tim contracted dysentery and had to be hospitalized. I was one of the last ones to get sick, but when it hit, it really hit, with me running to the bathroom constantly. And once that happened, I had this very strong sense that I had not really thought this all through and that joining the Peace Corps was a giant mistake.
So I left. I had not even made it one week into the two year commitment. I felt like a fool, a quitter. When Tim finally got out of the hospital, I imagined he looked around and asked, “Where’s Redmond?”
I didn’t see or hear from Tim for another 24 years, until I returned to Villanova for our 25th reunion. He told me that after he left the Peace Corps, he went into banking, hated it, and returned to school to become a nurse practitioner, which he loved. I told him that I too disliked my business job and had been working with homeless and runaway teenagers for the last few decades, now in Vermont.
Tim and I did not stay in touch, another 20 years went by, and with our 45th reunion coming up, the emails started flying as to who was going and who was staying with whom for the three days. It turned out it would be Tim, one other friend, and myself sharing an Airbnb near the university.
As the date of the reunion approached, I started to think back about my short time in the Peace Corps and about Tim. Forty-five years had passed, and I began to realize that I still felt badly for leaving him there, in the hospital nonetheless, when in a way we had made a pact back in 1979 when we decided to join together.
I believe that the “bubbling up” of this remorse within myself had everything to do with my devotion to centering prayer in the last few years. I learned about centering prayer during a parish retreat day in 1981 and have been practicing it since then, but sporadically, not as an every-day practice. It is only during the last two or three years, largely because of the encouragement of my wife, Marybeth, that I have done centering prayer faithfully, and not just once a day, but twice a day. (My spiritual director recently quoted to me something she had read, “To do centering prayer once a day is devotional; to do it twice a day is transformational.”)
Centering prayer is a form of contemplative prayer. Its roots go back to the 14th century The Cloud of Unknowing and revived largely through the ministry of the late Trappist Father Thomas Keating, starting in the 1970’s. His books, videos, and the organization he founded, Contemplative Outreach, can provide far better information and instruction than anything I can write. But in brief, it entails sitting quietly, spine erect, in a chair or on a cushion, remaining still for the next 20 minutes. Introduce what is called a sacred word, expressing your consent to God’s presence and action within you. It could be the word Jesus, peace, Mary; it does not matter. Thoughts will inevitably arise, which is normal, and when you realize you are thinking, gently return to the sacred word.
Father Keating writes that if you practice centering prayer consistently, eventually a phenomenon he terms “divine therapy” will occur. This means that all the painful emotions we have stored away in our subconscious, even from birth, will start to be unearthed and come to the fore. Anxiety, remorse, guilt, and other difficult states will be excavated and, in his words, “evacuated.”
With all this in mind, I decided that at some point during the upcoming three-day reunion, I’d apologize to Tim.
The reunion started on a Friday evening. I saw Tim right away along with many other classmates, so that was clearly not the time for me to speak with him one-on-one. But the next morning when I went down for breakfast at the house we were renting, I saw he was already up and thought, “Now is the time.”
But before I could say even one word, Tim spoke to me.
“You know what Mark?” he said. “There is something I’ve been meaning to say to you for 45 years. I’ve always wanted to tell you that I thought it was incredibly brave of you to do what you did back then, for you to recognize so early on that the Peace Corps was not for you, and to actually make the decision to leave knowing you’d probably catch derision and grief from some people back in the United States. It was one of the most courageous things I’ve ever witnessed.”
To say I was shocked would be an understatement.
“Brave?” I replied. “You think I was brave? I was just about to apologize to you for leaving you there, sick, in the hospital. I’ve felt guilty about that for 45 years.”
“No,” he replied. “You should not feel that way at all. We started out with over 40 people and do you know how many actually stuck out the full two years? Twenty-three, barely half of all those who had started. One by one people dropped out as the months rolled by, realizing it wasn’t for them. I bet a lot of those people knew in week one that the Peace Corps wasn’t for them, but they were too embarrassed to leave at that point. But you had the courage to do that, and I’ve always wanted to tell you that I admire you for it.”
Standing there in that kitchen, I almost burst into tears. It was like a wound that had been festering for over four decades was finally healed and healed by the man I thought I had abandoned.
This encounter also allowed me to reframe and look at the whole Peace Corps experience in a new way. It was no longer a matter of me “quitting when things got tough,” but as Tim said, having the wisdom to know when something isn’t right for you and the courage to follow through on that. I could see he was right, that sticking it out just for the sake of sticking it out isn’t healthy on any level. People unfortunately do this all the time in jobs, and even in relationships. They stay in situations that are no longer life-giving or healthy for them. I didn’t do that back in 1979, and in the intervening decades, I don’t think I have either.
I am grateful for centering prayer and for the teachings of Father Keating and others who are dedicated to this contemplative practice. I do believe in divine therapy, that God wants us to be healed in the deepest parts of our being. And I believe that contemplative prayer gives us wisdom when we have difficult decisions to make, and it gives us the courage to follow through.
I know it has for me.
Image: Unsplash/Jeremy Yap
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