Traveler, There is No Road
a story about choosing mystery over certainty.
After following Fr. Cyprian’s blog for some time, I learned his travels would be bringing him back to the Hermitage for a visit from Rome later that month. Because I never got to say good-bye before he left the Hermitage, I decided to email him to request that he meet with me. Graciously, he accepted.
I made my first retreat to the Hermitage in 2017 as part of a two-week solo trip for my 40th birthday. It was just after I rescinded my non-denominational ordination, left my job as a pastor at a charismatic evangelical university, and surrendered my 20-year career in ministry, so I was pretty traumatized at the time. Every year after that I made the same retreat to the Hermitage for my birthday. Then, in 2021, my husband and I spent the summer volunteering there. After that, we were invited to live there permanently as part of their monastic community. Fr. Cyprian was the Prior of the Hermitage during this entire span of events.
My first experience with Cyprian was in 2019 at a “yoga and neuroscience” retreat that happened to fall during one of my annual retreats. It was my first time being introduced to him as Prior and to what a prior even was. During that retreat, Cyprian gave a talk about the universal love of God. He used a metaphor of a mountain to illustrate the different religions of the world all ascending (ways of transformation) to the same summit (God) from different sides (theological and philosophical understanding) of the mountain. Having spent most of my life in the Assemblies of God and non-denominational church, the talk completely upended what was left of the foundation of my faith, my calling, and my worldview, and to be honest, it freaked me out so badly it triggered a full PTSD meltdown.
Immediately after the talk was over, I got in my car and drove 45 minutes down Highway 1 to the closest place I could find with a phone. As soon as I heard my husband’s voice on the other end of the line, I burst into tears explaining that this man, who had taken Christian vows before God, never mentioned the Cross once and completely disregarded Jesus as the only way to God. My husband, a former professor of world religions with a PhD in Theology, reassured me, “What you’re feeling is normal. When you first hear about other traditions and beliefs it can feel unmooring and very scary, but none of us really know. You’re just used to being in circles that think they do know, and if you question that you’re losing your faith, but our faith is in God, not our certainty. Don’t worry what this guy says for now. Just go back and get some sleep, and we can talk about this more when you get home.”
Now, it has taken me seven years to understand that the Cross does remain central in Cyprian’s mountain metaphor and is congruent with his Catholic faith. I’m not saying I agree with his theology entirely, but I’m also not shaken by it anymore. Like Dallas Willard, N.T. Wright, Eugene Peterson, and David Bentley Hart, I have come to understand God’s love, as expressed on the cross, in a less punitive and more inclusive way. What a journey this has been. One that began around that time I first met Cyprian, who curated an environment of stability, safety, and wonder for me to come to my own conclusions.
Cyprian was waiting for us on the deck outside the bookstore when we arrived. He greeted Mike and I with a big hug before inviting me to follow him to the chapel. We walked through the main wooden double doors to the tiny room at the back of the chapel that the monks use for Spiritual Direction. I sat down in the chair closest to the windows while Cyprian switched on the electric heater. When he sat down in the chair opposite of me I was reminded how small in stature he was. No wonder he was chilly—he didn’t have an ounce of fat on his body. When we lived at the Hermitage, I learned there was rarely a day that Cyprian didn’t practice yoga or go for a run down Highway 1. At night, when the staff scurried into the kitchen for dessert after evening prayer, Cyprian held fast to the Benedictine rule and opted for a simple salad.
Our time living together was somewhat contentious in that way too. As someone who regulates anxiety and reaches for connection through baking, I admittedly brought an obscene amount of baked goods into the kitchen in those early days of living at the Hermitage. Eventually, Cyprian had to tell me directly, “Look, I have to consider the health of the older monks. You can share one dessert a week.” I was also loud—laughing and joking around with the younger novitiate monks during my shifts in the kitchen and out in the courtyard by the meditation garden. Again, Cyprian had to remind me that we were, in fact, at a silent monastery.
Yet, over time, I settled down and we figured it out. I confined my baking to one holiday party, and Cyprian gave me permission to host the novitiates at our place for a pizza night where we could be as loud as we wanted. Looking back, I like to think that after decades of being a monk, Cyprian understood how challenging it was to live in monastic community while wrestling with the memories, emotions, and questions that bubble to the surface and scream for attention in so much silence and solitude. Yet, no matter how many times the younger part inside of me pushed Cyprian’s limits or tested his character, he always greeted me with a smile and an Italian term of endearment. “Ciao, Carissima!”, he would say. Whether it was his intention or not, I received it as his way of saying, “You’re driving me nuts, but I won’t let our differences deter me or divide us. We’ll learn from each other instead. Because that’s what Love does.”
The heater hummed in the corner, and as the room warmed up, Cyprian shared how his new position in Rome afforded him his own room in a building overlooking a beautiful area of the city. He had been promoted to overseeing inter-religious dialogue for monastic communities within the Catholic Church. His role would take him around the world, and in service to the Vatican. In turn, I shared that since Mike and I had been evacuated from the Hermitage after the atmospheric rivers washed out Highway 1 in 2023, we had been living in town where Mike continued to work for the college and I served as the Executive Director of our nonprofit. It was the perfect segue to why I was there.
I began to share how my time at the Hermitage changed my life. I talked about how the practices of silence, stillness, solitude, simplicity, contemplation, liturgical worship, and receiving the Eucharist arrested my compulsion to perform for God. I went on to explain how the wildness of Big Sur set the stage for an epic battle between my willpower and the uncontrollable nature of God—to which, I ultimately surrendered, and henceforth discovered a freedom and authenticity in my being that no longer resembled who I once was.
I said, “This spaciousness I have found within me…this way of being with God in the silence and stillness…it is the most important thing to me now…” Suddenly, a lump formed in my throat, and to keep the tears from completely taking over I laughed and exclaimed, “I’m sorry! I don’t know why I’m so emotional!” Unfazed, Cyprian replied, “There is no need to apologize”, and gently nodded toward the box of tissues next to me. I pulled a tissue from the box and wiped my eyes.
In the hospitality of Cyprian’s silence, I discovered the tension I felt within me. I could not go back to being the pastor and leader I once was and hold onto to who I had become. I had spent the last two years managing a grant that was awarded to our nonprofit that funded my salary, building the infrastructure of our programs, and our digital marketing efforts—and it nearly killed me. With the end of the grant just months away, I had to decide if I was going to continue these efforts by fundraising to replace my salary as Executive Director, or give myself fully to a contemplative life of prayer and writing as my vocation. The latter would require us to downsize, leave the expensive area we were living in, and to let go of the “strategic plan” we had for our nonprofit to flourish.
Once again, I had found myself sitting before Cyprian wrestling with certainty and the allure of following God further out into the wild landscape of my soul. We continued to talk about how he managed to survive as a writer and musician in the role of Prior for so many years. He explained that as a creative, I would have to find a way to see my nonprofit work as co-creating something beautiful with God. I reasoned then, if I were to continue with the nonprofit work my role would have to take a different form. It would have to accommodate my authentic self and hold space for my primary vocation—walking and talking with God—at the very center of my life.
The only question left to ask Fr. Cyprian was, “Where do I go from here?”
Cyprian replied, “There is a poem by Antonio Machado that I am working on putting into song right now. It is written in Spanish. It goes like this…”
Caminante, No Hay Camino
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada mas;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atras
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.
I didn’t know what the words meant, but as he recited the poem my spirit interpreted the moment as a divine invitation to let go and embrace the beauty of the journey into the unknown. The tears came up again, but this time, I took a deep breath, leaned back, and felt my body melt into the chair.
Cyprian continued, “The poem translates like this,…
Traveler, There is No Road
Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.
Cyprian went on to explain that the spiritual journey with Jesus is like this poem. Eventually, our journey leads us to the point where we must accept that there is no road. There are no street signs marked “certainty”, “success”, or “easy”. We come to understand that much of our suffering and dissociation from our authentic self is actually caused by grasping for these things. Over time, we simply learn to surrender and trust that just being with Jesus, who is the Way, is enough.
By then, the sun had come up over the cliffside and was streaming in through the windows. We laughed when realized how we were both sweating with the electric heater still humming along in the corner. Cyprian got up and turned it off, and then he sat down to closed our time together with these three points:
“One step at a time will be revealed.
You’ll know the next step when you know.
You won’t know until you go.”
In the days after my meeting with Fr. Cyprian, I was reminded of a dream I had when we first moved to the Hermitage. I feel asleep one night with a migraine headache that I had for three days. In my dream, I was on board an airplane that was in distress. The plane was flying through turbulence so strong, I thought for sure we were going to crash. However, the plane finally landed and parked in a large airplane hanger. All the monks of New Camaldoli were there, smiling and full of joyful expectation. When I got off the plane, Fr. Cyprian was standing in front of me in his white robes waiting to receive me. With my body still surging with fear and adrenaline and my face as white as a ghost, I ran to him and erupted, “We almost crashed! We almost crashed!” He wrapped me in his arms and I immediately fell silent. The fear drained from my body and I eased into stillness. The color returned to my cheeks. Right at that moment, I woke up. Laying there in bed beneath the moonlight coming through the skylight of our cabin, I realized my migraine headache was gone. The peace I felt in my dream was saturating my entire waking mind and body.
As I reflected on that dream, I thought about how my journey began at the Hermitage and how far I had come. The Hermitage, the monks, and Fr. Cyprian had served a sacred purpose in my life. They helped me establish safety and stability inside of myself. From that place, I was ready to step out on a new journey. But, this time, it didn’t matter so much where we were going because I had learned I was safe in the Father’s arms.