The Restory Retreat Centre

Photograph by George Angus “God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.”                                                                                          Meister Eckhart This past week we’ve started renovating the kitchen. It has been very hard work, ironically not so much renovating but taking down, breaking open, stripping. This morning I stand in the empty shell and look at all the patched cracks, the open rafters, all the wiring and pipes exposed and I ask Matilda: “Will it ever look better again?” “It will,” she says, “ you know that you often have to break to restore.” I find it no mere coincidence that right now I am busy reading T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as part of our Living School material. In the fourth section or “movement” of  the second Quartet I came across this line: “And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.” Breaking, stripping, entering darkness, vulnerability, weakness – all eleme