Retreat Reflections

“What did you learn in school today?”

Many of us had this question put to us, in some form or another, when we got home after a day of school as children.  I have had people asking me one variant of that question or another since I returned from my silent retreat in July.   “What was it like?”  “Did you learn anything?”  “What did you do or experience?”  “How did you stay silent for over a week?!”

Caryl (our parish administrator) suggested that I write a bit about my experience of retreat.  Particularly to share about what our Jesuit friends call the “graces” of my retreat: the fruits, the insights, the seeds of potential change in my life, the wisdom, the struggles, the joys, the places where God was present to me.  

So here, in no particular order, are some of the graces of my retreat, the “what I learned in school today” of eight days of silence in July at Bellarmine Jesuit Retreat House in Barrington, amidst wildflowers and trees, worship and prayer, good food and (shocking no one, I’m sure) many, many books…

The Power of Powerlessness

I preached a little bit about this a number of weeks back - that great wisdom of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.  That it is only when we realize our ultimate powerlessness, our need for God’s help, that we can become truly strong, or healed, or whole.  Something I kept coming back to over and over again on my retreat was how much energy, fruitless energy, I put into anxiety about things that I have no power over.  I spend so much time and stress on efforts to control things I really cannot control…Again the tradition of the Twelve Steps offers us the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”  Powerlessness - as AA puts it - is about understanding our limits and our attempts to circumvent them.  As Franciscan priest Richard Rohr writes, “We must be rid of the Imperial Ego.”  On retreat I came to understand in a deeper way how it is the ego - that in me which seeks to control, to fix, to manage, to protect ourselves and make ourselves feel good - which is near the core of all of my spiritual problems (maybe yours too?)  And the spiritual challenge before me every day, then, is to move from what Henri Nouwen calls “a self-centered monologue to a God-centered dialogue.”  What might that mean for you, I wonder?   I am spending lots of prayer time contemplating what it means for me.

The Necessity of Silence

Silence is a rare enough thing in our culture.  We are typically surrounded at all times by noise, by conversation or argument, by distractions.  And many of us are rather uncomfortable with silence - so we fill it up with words or music or videos on our phones.   But intentional silence affords us space.  Space to think.  To feel.  To look inward.  Free of distraction, noise, the chatter of social media and the news and all the stuff we fill our time with.  It can be scary to put away our distractions and have to sit with ourselves, our lives, our God.  But the space that silence affords is essential, I am learning, to any real spiritual growth for me.  Even though it might seem uncomfortable or like a waste of time, it is where God waits for us to share grace and to instruct us in who we really are when we set the distractions aside.

The Importance of Ritual and Routine

My days at Bellarmine were structured by ritual and routine.  I woke up every day for 7:30am morning prayers with the other retreatants.  Before that, I did my own morning devotions and Bible reading in my room, washed my face, brushed my teeth, shaved and dressed and fixed my hair.  After morning prayers, we had breakfast together (in silence, with meditative music playing).  I then fixed myself a cup of tea and went downstairs to meet with my spiritual director (a sort of personal trainer for my prayer life and journey through the week) for an hour.  Then I would go for a walk in the woods or through the wildflower prairies on the property and spend some time in silent prayer, reading, journaling.  At 11:15 we had our daily celebration of the Eucharist with preaching from one of the Jesuit priests in residence at Bellarmine.  Then we had lunch (again, in silence with music).  In the afternoon I would nap or shut my eyes for a bit before more prayer, reading, journaling.  After (silent) dinner, we had an hour of silent Eucharistic Adoration (spending time before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament).  Then I would shower and read a bit before my own nighttime prayers and bed.  And that was pretty much every day of my retreat.  Lather, rinse, repeat.   Obviously as soon as I got home from retreat, that structure was gone.  But the importance of structure itself, of ritual and routine, has stuck with me.  And while some days I do it better than others, I have found that some sort of daily ritual, some sort of daily routine (prayers at certain times, meals at certain times, a cup of tea or a nap, reading a book before bed) provides steadiness in all the unsteadiness of life!   Do you have structure or ritual in your days?

Don’t Fear the Darkness, Embrace It

“Let our fears of the darkness of the world and of our own lives rest in you.”  That’s part of a prayer from the Prayer Book of the Anglican Church of New Zealand.  One of the most powerful parts of my retreat was - with the help of my spiritual director - taking a good hard honest look at the dark or unflattering parts of myself and my life.  My failures, my sinful patterns of behavior, my fears, my selfishness, all the stuff that comes between me and God, between me and other people, between me and my most authentic self.  It was not easy.  I doubt many folks want to be that honest with themselves about the parts of themselves they are ashamed of or that they pretend don’t exist.  (I didn’t, really!)  But with the help of my spiritual director, I prayerfully brought all of that stuff into the light of God in Jesus Christ.  I acknowledged that this too is me (my Shadow, as Jung would say).  And I found there in the dark, to my surprise, God.  God’s love. God’s patience.  And God’s deep desire to enter into those places in me with me to help me bring them more fully into accord with God’s purposes and hopes for me.  With God we are able look at what we don’t want to look at.  And to admit to ourselves that we need help sorting it all out.   To hand our whole lives over to God.   Which brings me to the fact that…

We Cannot Go It Alone and We Don’t

Whenever anyone asks me how to read the Bible the first thing I usually say is, “Don’t do it alone.”  Jesus sent his followers out two-by-two, not on solo missions.  The spiritual life is a team sport, not a solitary activity.  And on my retreat I found that to be true over and over again.  I spoke above about how my work with my spiritual director allowed me to go deep into myself in prayer.  But throughout the week, the profound sermons offered by preachers at the daily mass, the wise words of the writers I was reading, and even just the steady silent presence of the other people on retreat, praying alongside me…it was all a powerful symbol of how the spiritual life is meant to be lived - which is to say: alongside others.  The spiritual pilgrimage of our lives is meant to be undertaken in conversation and dialogue with others.  And, of course, with God.  If there was any lesson I took away from my week, it was that I need others and, again, I need God.  I need to, again, move from a “self-centered monologue” - more and more, day by day - into a “God-centered dialogue.”

“The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God”

That line from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins sums up my week of retreat.  A mystic - one of my seminary professors used to say - is a person who has a direct experience of God.  My week was mystical.  Nobody was more surprised by that than me!  Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his magisterial book “A Secular Age” talks about how modern consciousness differs from, say, ancient and medieval consciousness.  The ancient and medieval worlds were “enchanted” - filled with an awareness of the presence of the spiritual and the divine.  Our modern world is “disenchanted” - a purely material place of rationality.  Stuff, not spirit.  But I was bowled over again and again on retreat by what I can only describe as a mystical sense that God was present and at work all around me.  Offering me lessons and grace through the bumblebees’ steady patient work, the free flight of the barn swallows over the fields, in a line of a sermon or a text I was reading, in a thought unbidden in my silence.  I was being offered glimpses of a reality so much wider and deeper and more profound than the one I mostly live in.  I have a hard time putting it into words because it is so strange to how most of us modern people live.  But the poet nails it.  The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God.  My retreat allowed me to see that more clearly, even in little bits.  The challenge now is to keep that way of seeing as the mundane, rational, modern world surrounds me.

This seeing, this vision - of myself and my life, of others, of God - is finally what I learned on retreat.  And what I hope to continue to live into over time.  It is the great challenge of an experience like the one I had, I think.  To live the retreat.  And so I’ll close these ramblings with a couple of stanzas from my favorite hymn which - like all good poetry - says all of this much better than I can…

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;

Naught be all else to me save that thou art.

Thou my best thought by day and by night;

Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.

Heart of my heart, whatever befall,

Still be my vision, O Ruler of all.

Faithfully,

The Rev. Adam Spencer, Rector