The decision to attend my first women’s retreat felt indulgent and nerve-racking. Indulgent, because it represented an escape from so many responsibilities. Nerve-wracking in that I didn’t know any of the other women who’d be there, and I’d have to travel from Los Angeles to the remote Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, where cell reception was limited.

What hooked me was that the retreat was led by a Jungian analyst and author who I greatly admire, who would guide us in analyzing fairytales that portray the heroine’s journey, and stages of female initiation. I hoped I would gain wisdom from these archetypal tales of womanhood, and return home armed with secret knowledge.

It was a time in my life when I desperately needed a break from the emotional and physical demands of motherhood. Over 11 years, domestic turmoil had engulfed me. The needs of others—my children’s, my husband’s—flattened my own desires into a pattern of self-sacrifice that only seemed to increase their demands that I do more, feel more, tend to them more. I fought for balance between my work and family lives, a balance that I now realize doesn’t exist. I was feeling suffocated, and startled by my own rage.

I wasn’t interested in the less complicated reasons why some women go away for the weekend. I didn’t need a massage or a bottle of wine (although those sound nice). I didn’t want a feminist guru to teach me how to create a spreadsheet to divvy up household chores between myself and my partner, magically releasing us from traditional gender roles. I wanted something more.

What I wanted, deep down, was what the poet Mary Oliver describes in “I Have Decided” : “…a home in the mountains/somewhere high up/where one learns to live peacefully in/the cold and the silence. It’s said that/in such a place certain revelations may/be discovered. That what the spirit/reaches for may be eventually felt, if not/exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I’m/not talking about a vacation.”

The retreat didn’t disappoint. Over three days, sitting on chairs in a drafty meeting room, we examined fairytales, we shared experiences, and we probed the links between them. We analyzed, we questioned, we laughed, we acknowledged each other’s suffering. Most importantly, we held a sacred space for ourselves, a space we had all been craving.

The last night of the gathering, a full moon blazed in the sky, reflecting off the motionless dark lake. We had a bonfire on the itinerary, but the retreat center couldn’t get the wood, damp from a recent rain, to ignite. Rather than give up on it, we rallied together—making our own kindling with wood, twigs, and loose blank paper from our journals. The wind kicked up, and we had to keep tending to the tentative flames, but after half an hour the fire blazed, radiating a thick warm heat.

Around the fire, my new companions and I took turns reciting poems and telling stories. Sipping red wine from plastic cups, the atmosphere felt celebratory and jubilant and yet undergirded by the depth of our shared emotional journeys. We cackled like witches. We half-jokingly howled at the moon. One young woman played a song on her ukulele, her voice rich and tremulous with emotion.

It was while she was singing that a group of young men entered our line of vision, hovering around the edge of the hillside. It turned out they were scheduled to use the bonfire, too. A camp director apologized for the double booking and asked us if we’d cut our allotted time short.

We had analyzed fairy tales that emphasized the importance of women upholding emotional boundaries and not participating in self-betrayal. For example, the Russian tale Vasilisa the Beautiful, collected by Alexander Afanasyev, is about a girl who, forced into the dark forest by her evil step-mother, ends up in Baba Yaga’s hut—working for, and learning from, the magical fearsome witch.

The girl completes a variety of impossible tasks and as a reward, Baba Yaga allows her to return to the step-mother’s house armed with her own fire: a skull that burns from within. In a final twist, the coals inside the skull immolate the step-mother and step-sisters, reducing them to ashes. Vasilisa escapes bondage through the ferocity of her own inner fire.

I imagined myself carrying a metaphorical burning skull to delineate my needs from those of others. At the same time, stepping aside and conceding felt familiar to me—and to the rest of the group, apparently. Given the double-booking mistake, we agreed to relocate inside.

First we stole a few more minutes to savor the radiant fire we had created. To enjoy the crisp October air. The full moon. Our warm breath spiraling in the air.

The young men edged closer. “We’re tired of waiting!” one of them grumbled. Their impatience was palpable. A member of our group—kind and soft-spoken, a minister—stood up and walked over to them.

“Boys, you can wait five minutes,” she said. “We’ve waited 10,000 F—ING YEARS!”

Her internal strength hadn’t been fully apparent to me until then. When those young men had first walked our way, I’d felt a pang of empathy. They reminded me of my son, at home. They too needed a fire. They too had come here for a sense of community and belonging.

But in this moment, it hit me like a lightning bolt: We have been waiting 10,000 f—ing years.

For what, exactly? What precious thing had we lost?

The answer came tumbling out of me: So many rights. And rites. The days we had shared together were a reminder of ancient rites, created for and by women to better understand themselves and their experience of the world, through contact with the divine.

The original Mother Goddess emerged in far-flung locales—Sumer, India, Africa, Australia, China, Egypt, and classical Greece—and over spans of thousands of years. There was Maya, mother of all forms and names, Isis and Cybele, Ishtar and Kali, the faint echo of the invisible Shekinah in Judaism, Cerridwen the Celtic goddess, Amaterasu the celestial Japanese goddess of the sun and the heavens, the Nigerian goddess Oshun of Yuroba cosmology, and Lilith, the first woman, who refused to have sex with Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Despite preexisting Judeo-Christian religions for thousands of years, these ancient goddesses were muzzled and banished, pushed underground to make way for Yahweh and Jesus, Mohammed, and Gautama Buddha, all of whom demanded undivided love and devotion. Over centuries, any woman who exhibited the spark of the divine within her was deemed a witch, burned or drowned, beheaded or stoned, or simply shoved into the margins of society. Some scholars refer to this period, which faded by the end of the 18th century, as the female holocaust.

The morning after our campfire debacle, we sat in a circle sipping hot coffee, and discussed how we had, once again, been displaced, volunteering up our own discomfort so that others could feel comfortable. Capitulating the fire that we built ourselves was a small, but symbolic reminder of how the patriarchy continued to stifle our flame.

I wished I could stay in that circle of women forever, bathed in sisterly understanding and the strong Sunday sun streaming through the windows. And yet I knew the whole point of our experience was to carry what we learned with us back home. For me, this meant implementing boundaries so that I could focus and write, and (somehow) holding my mother-guilt at bay while nurturing emotional closeness within my family. For the group, it meant not making ourselves smaller or apologizing for taking up space, as women have done for generations as a method of self-preservation.

Men are so often suspicious of a group of women gathered around a fire, laughing and hooting at the moon. Perhaps, they fear our bright hot rage and beneath that, the collective grief that has been stirring within us for centuries.

Sitting there in that circle was a reminder that we don’t have to reinvent all that was lost. We only need to remember it.

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Castillo draws upon her favorite climate—the tropics—for this month’s Sketchbook. Her digital paintings incorporate the idea that “all animals are enlightened beings, and that nature represents a bigger force, call it the universe, or god.” As you look at Castillo’s work, consider the way she chooses to blend each animal into its surroundings, and where she allows parts of it to pop into the foreground, using shapes, colors, textures, and the occasional surrealistic element to establish contrast.

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Wander inside the shop, and you’ll find every surface packed with totems, oils, potions, pendants, plastic souvenirs, herbs, and unmarked satchels of gris-gris; a variety of Laveau effigies for sale; and small back rooms for tarot and psychic readings. The whole place toes that line one finds all over the city of New Orleans, which presents itself as both tourist pap and the genuine article. But the blurring of that line comes as no disrespect to the shop’s namesake. Marie Laveau, ostensible founder of American Voodoo, was very familiar with borderlands, with following that thin line between the sacred and profane.

Though they have often been overlooked or erased from the official record, prophetesses like Laveau have populated the American scene since the beginning—spiritual innovators and religious visionaries like Shaker messiah Ann Lee, godmother of liberation theology Sojourner Truth, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, among many others. Marie Laveau strikes me as the most fundamentally American of them all.

This painting, produced in 1920, is purportedly a copy of an earlier painting made of Marie Laveau by George Catlin in 1835. Courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum.

Laveau was born in New Orleans in 1801 (or, according to some accounts, 1794) as a free person of color, descending from a long line of enslaved foremothers. Her parents were both mixed-race, free, though hailing from different lines of the Caribbean slave economy. Not much is known about their genealogies or relationship. Likewise, the particulars of Laveau’s childhood and early adulthood are made of layer upon layer of contesting legend. Was she widowed or abandoned by her first husband, Jacques Paris? Did she have two children or seven? Did she acquire her political intel as a hairdresser? Which female relative trained her in conjure? What we do know for sure is that by the middle of the century, Marie Laveau was a Voodoo (or Voudou, or Voudun) priestess of high repute, presiding over a multiracial, multiclass, multidenominational following.

Her spiritual dominion over New Orleans ushered in a distinctly American Voodoo, one that was more porous and flexible in its influences and practices, encompassing more gods (or “Iwa”) than the Haitian Voudun that had been passed down to her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother before her. Marie Laveau is thought to be American Voodoo’s earliest public practitioner—and in this way, its prophet. From the 1820s to the 1880s, she was famous across the land. People traveled to her from far and wide for counsel, ceremony, remedy, and insight, and her clientele knew no bounds: poor, rich, white, black, free, enslaved, slave-owning, she administered to them all—and not infrequently she administered to them all at once, together.

Laveau’s community ceremonies took place in big, public spaces like the shores of Lake Ponchartrain and the paving stones of Congo Square, as well as in the private homes of the elite bourgeoisie. Her St. John’s Eve summer solstice ceremonies saw people from every stratum of New Orleans public life, observing sacred rites of annual renewal. In doing this, she wasn’t changing the social structure but instead highlighting what was already there. Her theology and teachings were syncretic, drawing from her experiences in the Catholic church and the Ursuline nuns who, according to her biographer Martha Ward, likely educated her, and above all from the traditions transmuted during the Middle Passage to the Caribbean, where her maternal great-grandmother had been trafficked generations before. Catholic saints took on the names of Hatian Iwa (gods), and vice versa. But even those traditions, by the time they reached Laveau, had been filtered through encounters with other Afro-Caribbean religions like Santería and Yoruba, and even North American indigenous ceremony. It’s the sheer volume of influences and variety, and the scope of her reach, both in her theology and in her following, that seem so deeply in keeping with the long project of American religion-making.

The history of that project has long been told through the experiences and viewpoints of white men, but there have always been a much more diverse set of prophets among us. A prophet is someone who talks to god (or the gods) and brings messages back to the flock. A prophet typically offers a new interpretation of a sacred tradition or text that points toward not only reconsidering the practices or premises of institutionalized religion, but also toward significant social change. A prophet is not a saint and may not be concerned with achieving perfection or ascension or even enlightenment. Prophecy happens to the prophet. In fact, prophets are traditionally made into freaks: so strange or countercultural, presenting an image or carrying a message that is so unwelcome, that they are cast to the margins or the wilderness.

As such outcasts, America’s women prophets were already in a difficult position. Living under patriarchy put them in a double bind of public doubt—which for Laveau, as a black woman, was a triple bind. So they had to assert their power in unusual ways, trying both to “contest the [male] monopoly of the pulpit” (to quote the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention’s “Declaration of Sentiments”) while claiming special access to the truth as “outsiders.” This position became more possible for women to assume as the 19th century’s Second Great Awakening unfolded, essentially “awakening” the white public’s belief that anyone—regardless of race, class, sex or age—could have direct access to God, and so more and more, the prophetesses’ outsider status emboldened the public’s regard for her.

While different American prophetesses’ truths may have varied in content, they all endeavored to make the same basic intervention: to spell out or live out their tradition’s concealed wisdom, according to the God (or gods) with whom they communed. They wrested interpretive authority over traditions that had been talking to, or about, them for millennia. In keeping with American tradition, their movements were self-invented, and their images self-made. The American religion scholar Catherine Ann Brekus notes in her book Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740 -1845 that because women’s contributions to religion have been continually stymied or scrubbed from the official record, their history is “characterized not by upward progress, but by discontinuity and reinvention.” But this has struck me as something that, maybe only incidentally, keeps their contributions vital, because they are difficult to appropriate.

Many prophetesses shared a particularly American canniness when it came to navigating the free market to convey their theology. Mary Baker Eddy busted into the for-profit publishing sector (books and newspapers), Sojourner Truth produced a wide array of merchandise (paperback autobiography, self-portrait tintypes), and Aimee Semple McPherson monetized the airwaves (on radio, and almost TV). The private sector provided prophetesses the means to ascend, where the churches had otherwise barred them access. Another commonality was their ability to create an enigmatic public image, of staying just barely out of reach, but also very vivid to people at the same time. Sojourner Truth renamed herself under divine influence. Mary Baker Eddy wrote dozens of conflicting autobiographical accounts. Aimee Semple McPherson is widely believed to have staged her own fake kidnapping, after which she still retained tens of thousands of followers.

Marie Laveau encompassed all of these aspects of American prophetesses, and far more. As a business and property owner, and a personal hair stylist, she developed enduring relationships across the complicated caste system of 19th century New Orleans. Her spiritual work had multiple dimensions, beyond her ceremonies: Biographer Carolyn Morrow Long has unearthed records of her prison activism, including her ministry to men on Death Row, and of her unparalleled triage work during the Yellow Fever epidemic. Martha Ward has pieced together a history of her efforts to liberate slaves by purchasing their freedom, revealing how Laveau’s spiritual practices were part and parcel with her vision of human rights.

And yet, however much we feel we know about her and however much she’s been inscribed on the city of New Orleans—through monuments like her oft-visited grave in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, through shops in the French Quarter, through the New Orleans Voodoo Museum, or through her very spirit—Laveau left no written record whatsoever. Everything we know about her is from census or secondhand, cobbled together from dozens of secondary sources, including contemporary biographers, the oral histories of old-timers recorded by Zora Neale Hurston during the Depression, Robert Tallant’s tall tales, novels, yellow journalism, and folk songs. This adds to her legendary power: We cannot pin her down. We can only trace her edge. The archive of her life and ministry requires our collective imaginations. People can write over her or appropriate her, contest each other’s memories or decrypt public records, but she will always own her story. The truth of her life will remain just out of reach to the rest of us.

If there is a single big takeaway from looking at the history of American prophetesses, it’s that the project has always been about freeing belief systems from powerbrokers, contesting the “monopoly of the pulpit,” and making way for a highly personal truth. Women like Marie Laveau had to elide the powers that be, to tap into the deeper source. Her prophecy was embodied by the community she created, which represented what America had always been and would always be: diverse, multiracial, contradictory, syncretic, mystical, stratified, racist, and only thinly democratized. Laveau embodies all of the complexities of this country, its religious and racial and cultural confusion, its violence and madness, and resolves all of it in her person and her theology. She contains multitudes—whether real or imagined. That’s where her prophetic vision issues from. It’s less that she had a specific prediction of the future, and more that she was the future.

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Almost to a person, they had been inspired by what today, at the beginning of the 21st century, we recognize as the watershed book in the history of American camping: the first comprehensive “how-to-camp” guidebook, Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks, which had been written in April 1869 by a young minister named William H.H. Murray. Promoting a powerful combination of nature as spiritual and physical cure, and camping as an open and equal activity, Murray’s book took a previously quiet region and transformed it into a nationwide destination, and gave Americans a new, reassuring form of leisure.

William Henry Harrison Murray was born in 1840 to a modest New England family whose ancestors had been among the first settlers of his hometown, Guilford, Connecticut. His boyhood was an enthusiastic mixture of study, farm work, and outdoor recreation. “Bill,” as he was generally known, learned to shoot, hunt, and fish, even as he developed a voracious reading habit and a taste for literature. Gregarious and energetic, Murray entered Yale College in fall 1858, and upon graduating immediately married Isadora Hull, who also loved the out of doors. Determined to become a minister, Murray entered the Congregationalist East Windsor Seminary near Hartford, Connecticut where he finished his theological studies in 1864. He then served in a succession of increasingly prosperous and prestigious churches in Connecticut and Massachusetts, most famously at the Park Street Church in Boston. During these years, Murray earned a reputation as a church leader and as an eloquent, engaging speaker, but he also gained notoriety for enjoying such outdoor recreations as hunting and fishing, which Congregationalists generally discouraged because they viewed these sports as undermining pastoral zeal.

Murray took his first camping vacation in the Adirondacks in summer 1864 and returned annually for many years. He canoed and hiked widely; his favorite campsite was on Osprey Island at Raquette Lake. Occasionally Murray brought parties with him, which could include not only his friends, but his wife and his friends’ wives. Smitten by the Adirondacks’ beauty and the leisure time he enjoyed there, Murray started writing about his trips in a series of lively, often humorous “narrative exercises.” Such compositions were common among ministers who worked on animated, cheerful essays to improve their ability to devise engaging sermons. In Murray’s case, the subjects included canoeing, hunting, fishing, and the powerful beauty of nature. The voice was steadily self-deprecating and ironic.

William H. H. Murray. Photo courtesy of Terence Young.

Murray never intended his “narrative exercises” for publication—but when a good friend encouraged him in 1869 to publish a book on any subject with the prestigious Boston publisher of Osgood, Fields, and Company, Murray, who liked the idea but did not have a manuscript, bundled the exercises with an introductory chapter and submitted them. Initially publisher James T. Fields declined Murray’s manuscript, but not wanting to embarrass the minister, he reluctantly agreed to read the submission. Two days later, he called Murray to his office with exciting news: He wanted to publish Murray’s book that spring. “Your method of interpreting nature and your humor are unlike anything that we have ever seen, ” Fields said. “This little book, I am confident, is destined to a great career.”

Adventures in the Wilderness was met with mixed reviews. The Overland Monthly dismissed Murray’s writing as “gorgeous French, badly translated” while The Nation found his practical advice to be “sensible and worth taking.” Nonetheless, the book was immediately popular with the public and a tremendous commercial success, making Murray both famous and wealthy by June. We do not know exactly how many copies were sold, but the numbers probably rose into the tens, and perhaps hundreds, of thousands. The book was in its tenth printing by July 7. Years later, Murray recalled that for a long time Adventures had sold at a rate of approximately 500 per week.

Within months of the book’s release, the sleepy Adirondack region was transformed, as an unprecedented horde of 2,000 to 3,000 recreational campers, hunters, and anglers arrived from New York, Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia, and other cities. According to a reporter on the 1870 scene, “Mr. Murray’s book … drew a throng of pleasure-seekers into the lake region. It was amusing to see the omnipresence of this book. It seemed to be everywhere. Hawked through the cars; placarded in the steamers; for sale in the most unlooked-for places; by every carpet-bag and bundle lay a tourist’s edition of Murray.”

The stampede of visitors, which continued unabated through the summers of 1869 and 1870, came to be called “Murray’s Rush” and its instigator gained a nickname: “Adirondack” Murray. By July 1869, demand for Adventures was so great that unscrupulous publishers began to produce a knock-off “Tourist’s Edition” with twelve pages of railroad timetables and a map in the back pocket. Railroads began to offer a free copy with each round-trip ticket to the Adirondacks to generate more riders. Soon, it seemed that everyone traveling to the Adirondacks owned “a copy of Murray.”

Adventures produced its remarkable effect for several reasons. The Adirondacks were more accessible than ever, as railroads and a telegraph line reached the region’s margin in 1868. The post-Civil War economy was booming, which increased middle class wealth and made it possible for more people to buy Murray’s book and act on his advice. Finally, Murray’s book had substance. Adirondack travel literature published prior to Adventures had offered readers little useful information, but the long introductory chapter in Murray’s book offered a great deal of practical advice. Murray explained how to get to the Adirondacks, how to avoid pesky insects, where to buy equipment, which qualities to value in a guide, a few names of local guides, and what accommodations were available. He told nascent campers what gear to bring, and what to leave at home.

Furthermore, Adventures produced its dramatic popular response because Murray was the first writer to present camping as pilgrimage. In its simplest form, a pilgrim is someone who leaves home, journeys to a sacred place as an act of devotion, and returns home changed; personal motivations vary, but pilgrims typically seek escape from the routine and restrictions of ordinary life in order to find spiritual satisfaction and comfort, as well as other desired objectives like wealth, longevity, or happiness.

Pilgrims need not be religiously oriented, and in the United States they have tended not to be. American pilgrims frequently headed out of cities to rural and wildland areas for family reunions, revivals, and the like even before Adventures appeared. Murray, unlike his literary predecessors, placed camping within this American pilgrimage pattern. He held out the Adirondacks as a sacred place that could act as a balm to everyday iniquities. American life had changed rapidly after the Civil War, which had spurred widespread industrialization and urbanization. Growing cities offered enhanced employment options, improved amenities, and a host of other attractions, but also assaulted their residents. Smoke, noise, and crowding; shifting gender, class, ethnic, and other social relations; increased social diversity and stratification; production schedules and pervasive regulation, and other rapid changes left many city dwellers confused, alienated, and with their sense of identity unmoored and adrift.

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, a Civil War surgeon wearing the “Turkish Drawers” outfit described by Murray. Photo courtesy of Terence Young.

Yearning for a sense of belonging and connection, they heard Murray’s call to the wild. The minister explicitly blamed urban life for his readers’ yearnings and aches, and prescribed camping as cure. Adventures, he declared, was written for those “who, put up in narrow offices and narrower studies, weary of the city’s din, long for a breath of mountain air and the free life by field and flood.” These lost ideals, he assured his readers, could be found on a camping trip. Murray repeatedly detailed how one’s physical health benefited from an Adirondack outing and, being a minister, argued that camping was essential for one’s spiritual vitality. “If a person would know how sensitive his nature is,” Murray declared, “he must leave the haunts of men, where every sight and sound distracts his attention … and amid the silence of the woods, hold communion with his Maker.”

Pilgrimage often involves some equalizing of the social divisions that occur in everyday life. Murray broke the gender barrier by insisting that camping was “delightful to ladies. There is nothing in the trip which the most delicate and fragile need fear. And it is safe to say, that, of all who go into the woods, none enjoy the experiences more than ladies, and certain it is that none are more benefited by it.” To cement women’s interest, his book detailed the components for a “Ladies Outfit,” including gloves with “armlets,” a felt hat, a “flannel change throughout,” waterproof footwear, and a “short walking-dress, with Turkish drawers fastened with a band tightly at the ankle.” No woman, in Murray’s opinion, was to avoid camping because she feared for her health or safety.

With Murray as its suddenly famous proselytizer, camping exploded onto the American scene—for men and women, young and old. Adventures was a well-written and practical book, but more than that, the public was ready for its message. The Adirondack summers of 1871 and afterward were never again as wild as those of 1869 and 1870, but that was only because Saranac Lake’s facilities expanded, and an ever-increasing number of campers spread out to surrounding regions. When William H.H. Murray told America’s growing middle classes that their cities were profane and that pollution, regulation, and crowding were destroying their sense of belonging, they agreed—more than anyone, even Murray, had suspected was possible.

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As an antidote to this madness, every year in mid-November, about 20 people from my church, First Lutheran of Venice, drive to Valyermo in the high desert to spend the weekend in another millennium. My church group includes life-long German Lutherans, converted Lutherans, lapsed Catholics, former cult members, and stray humanists who haven’t yet made up their minds about Jesus. We do not agree on every point of doctrine, nor do we agree on political and social issues. What connects us is our belief in a loving God and our need for community.

Our place of withdrawal is St. Andrew’s Abbey, a community of Benedictine monks who operate a non-denominational retreat house where visitors are “welcomed as Christ.” While at the abbey, we live and eat simply, slowly. Whether we speak or keep silent, it is with intention. We leave behind our individual selves and become reunited as a community. We are able to do all this because of the horarium, the daily schedule of the abbey that prescribes specific times for prayer, study, and community.

The monks’ hospitality is genuine, but the accommodations are not opulent. Two low cinderblock structures of 10 rooms apiece house guests, each room containing two twin beds, a desk and chair, a couple of lamps, a temperamental wall heater, and a small bathroom. Given that this is the desert, one might also expect to find some small creature in the room, annoying but not deadly. The majority of our time is spent in the lodge, with its massive stone hearth and abundance of comfy chairs, or walking the grounds of the abbey, awash in the yellows, browns, and reds of fall foliage, the grayish green of cacti and Joshua trees, and the purple of the surrounding mountains.

At most services, the monks sing softly and in unison as a reflection of their sense of community and humility. In a two-week cycle, they will sing all 150 Psalms to acknowledge the Lord’s presence in the natural cycles of life. Psalms are sung on a single note, rising or falling at the end of a line, and ending in a scriptural refrain that changes according to the seasons of the liturgical year. This gives the worship an ancient quality, and connects the singers to all those who have worshiped in this way since the early church.

After Friday night’s supper, we are greeted by Father Patrick, the subprior, who gives a brief history of the abbey for the first-timers and reminds us all of the horarium and the thinness of the guest-quarter walls. Father Patrick was raised Catholic but lost his faith as a young man. Years later, he felt a deep need in his life and came back to the church. After a retreat much like ours, he decided to pursue a vocation and was ordained at the age of 62. His story resonates with our group, many of whom lost faith and returned to it later in life.

The abbey gets very quiet after Compline, the evening prayers. In the years that I have been going to St. Andrew’s, I have succeeded in observing the “Grand Silence” exactly once and, even then, not for the full 12 hours. The purpose of our silence is to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit. It’s not an audible, get-the-straight-jacket kind of voice; it’s more like the voice of a wise mentor or one’s own conscience. This voice gets drowned out in the everyday busyness of life. Being silent for one hour or 12 doesn’t guarantee a profound revelation, but it is another way of slowing down the racing mind and obtaining peace.

As we adjust to the rhythms of the horarium, some of us are unable to unwind from our sea-level lives and appreciate the quiet, worries clinging to us like commercial-grade plastic wrap. It can be good to sit with that discomfort, the knowledge that you are one hot spiritual mess and the fear that everyone else knows it too. On the other hand, sometimes, you have to let your church group members in on the secret, so they can help you haul that trash to the dump.

Oblate Cemetery at St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, CA.

This cleansing begins with a morning service of praise called Lauds. Praise is simply being grateful for who God is, acknowledging his nature as Creator, Father, and Defender. It isn’t asking for stuff; the churchy word for that is “supplication.” The Psalms sung during Lauds are chosen because they address some aspect of God’s character. The final stanza of each Psalm is a variation on the phrase, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” emphasizing the triune nature of God. As the congregation sings these lines, we rise together and bow as a sign of deep humility.

Our meals are served buffet-style in the large cinderblock dining hall with a vaulted ceiling and full eastern wall of stained glass in an abstract pattern. Breakfast is always eaten in silence, and dinner is silent until after a reading from the Lives of the Saints. The brothers are soft-spoken at all times, so we tend to be so as well. At lunch, the soup is ladled out by Brother Peter, who smiles as though this is an ecstatic oblation.

Brother Peter Zhou Bang-Jiu was professed to the original St. Benedict’s Priory in Chengtu, China. In 1952, after several years of persecution, the Communist regime expelled the European monks from China, closed the abbey, and threw Brother Peter into prison, where he remained for 26 years. He kept his sanity by writing copious amounts of poetry, which he committed to memory for lack of pen and paper. He rejoined the abbey, transplanted to Valyermo in 1984 and has served here ever since. His presence alone is a blessing.

The weekend officially comes to an end on Sunday morning, when we hold a private Lutheran service amid a stand of rustling white Aspen trees planted in 1954. As I drive the hour and a half back toward Los Angeles, I think about Father Patrick, Brother Peter, and all those who have journeyed with me and taught me about living a life of gratitude and humility. The purpose of the desert sojourn is to have intimacy with God, yet I find that I have gained greater intimacy with my fellow church members also. The challenge is to keep these gifts once I leave.

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She lived a full life, but illness is getting the best of her. Could be days, could be weeks, the doctors say—unless, that is, she tries one particular treatment. It’d involve some suffering on her part—needles, tubes, doctors checking up on her and all that—but, if it works, it’d buy her another few months.

The family’s divided: Her daughter says fight the illness, give her everything medicine’s got. Her son doesn’t want her to endure any more pain.

So, which is the right option? When is it time to prepare for death instead of delaying the inevitable? And did anyone ever bother to ask grandma what she wants?

John Fairhall, the editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News, presented this scenario last night to an overflow crowd at a Zócalo/UCLA event, “Does Medicine Know How to Approach Death?” The scenario is a common one in hospitals, he said. In an age of rapid technological innovation and tremendous advances in medical treatment, medicine is capable of extending life longer than ever before. But with this new power come new ethical challenges. Moderating a discussion at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Fairhall pressed four panelists to tackle the hard question of who decides when and how we should die. They agreed the answer first and foremost is a matter of respect—and planning.

“I think the real meaning of treatment is getting to know a patient,” said Susan Stone, a doctor in the Annadel Medical Group of the health care network St. Joseph Health. “We have to understand who this person is. What do they do in their life? What are the things important to them now?”

Sure, we live longer than we used to, Dr. Stone added, but the quality of that longer life needs to be taken into account. “Just because something is there doesn’t mean we have to use it,” she said.

Katherine Brown-Saltzman, a registered nurse who directs the UCLA Health System Ethics Center, agreed with this principle, yet added that things get complicated. While some families make an effort, along with their doctors and other health care providers, to plan for the end of life, the stress of actually confronting death has a tendency to make us throw plans out the window. Families still end up disagreeing, and doctors worry about upsetting people and provide false hope for treatment, when they should be advising patients to look into hospice, the form of end-of-life care that focuses on reducing suffering rather than extending living.

“Until very recently, we as a society haven’t had good conversations about what our values are,” Brown-Saltzman said. “There’s a lot of fear, often the need for control, and not enough listening happening. What does a good death even look like? ‘What do I want this to look like?’ It’s very difficult to sort that out when all these options are in front of you, and medicine is coming from the perspective of ‘let’s look for a cure.’”

The solution, the panelists agreed, is not just a more individual approach to patients, but a more holistic one as well—addressing not only physical needs, but psychological ones; alleviating not only pain, but suffering. This approach goes beyond the purview of doctors to encompass nurses, social workers, and chaplains, among others.

“The existential pain at the end of life can be so great, from a lifetime of shoving things under the rug,” said the Rev. Lori Koutouratsas, palliative care chaplain at the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica. “I have conversations with physicians all the time who are like, ‘I don’t know what to do with this patient.’ … For me, being a pastor is an opportunity to connect with people intimately, and to help them in whatever human condition they’re going through—to help them adapt and make meaning out of what they’re experiencing.”

But the approach to meeting patients’ needs isn’t without its controversies. Exactly how far should medicine go?

California State Senator Bill Monning talked about losing multiple friends to cancer, which was part of the inspiration for the End of Life Option Act, a law he co-authored that legalizes the provision of a lethal drug to consenting, mentally stable terminal patients who have less than six months to live. (Monning and others prefer the term “death with dignity,” on the grounds that “suicide” technically is an irrational act.)

“We live in a culture in denial of death,” he said. “[The End of Life Option Act] would underscore the efforts of wanting to create compassionate choices for a situation.”

Despite disagreements over the law’s ethics, the panelists agreed that, on principle, at least, the more options available to patients, the better. In a question and answer session with the audience, they talked about the importance of overcoming cultural and economic barriers so that services like palliative and hospice care are available to everyone, not just those who can afford them or who already know they’re viable routes.

That means educating both doctors and patients about when to look beyond mere treatment. It also means more carefully allocating funds to a variety of ways to deal with dying, rather than throwing as much money as possible at keeping people alive for as long as possible.

Brown-Saltzman told a story from her hospital about an estranged son who came to see his dying father, who could no longer speak. The son didn’t know what to do, so Brown-Saltzman gave him a razor and suggested he shave him. In doing so, the son remembered all the joyful moments he had with his father earlier in life (including his father teaching him how to shave), and forgave the father for whatever had caused their split.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Brown-Saltzman said. “That’s the kind of healing I want.”

The post In Medicine, Dying Doesn’t Have to Be a Struggle appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is a scene that could play out only in our present age of medicine. Advances in medical care have allowed us to extend life beyond what was previously possible. But what life becomes in these cases isn’t always pretty: The price for a few more days or months may be intense suffering. “In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality,” Gawande writes. The result, he says, is “a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.”

Who decides how to die? When is it right to stave off death with all the technology available, and when is it right to accept the end—through hospice care, which focuses on making the end of life as comfortable as possible, or even, at a controversial extreme, through physician-assisted suicide? In advance of a January 20 Zócalo/UCLA event, “Does Medicine Know How to Approach Death?”, we asked end-of-life experts: What can medicine do to better cope with the ethical challenges of modern end-of-life care?

The post Has Modern Medicine Made Dying Harder Than Ever? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.