Spiritual Retreat
This weekend I will be attending a “mens’ retreat”. The idea of “retreat” is different in the Protestant tradition, I’ve discovered. When I was a practicing Catholic, a “retreat” usually meant a contemplative experience punctuated by a monologue of teaching by a Jesuit priest acting as Retreat Director. We spent 3 days in silence, once a year, in a remote location. Even meals were taken in silence.
My last 12 years have been spent at Protestant “men’s retreats”. These events by comparison have a rambunctious quality, a sort of feverish intensity to reach God by praise and song.
Both experiences have their merits, and each brings me a step closer to God in the journey of a lifetime. I still have a foot in the contemplative tradition, and I find God sometimes most readily in the small space of a silent attention. But the Holy Spirit can just as readily appear to the sound of drums and and a thousand male voices offering their hearts in song. It seems to me God is always ready to meet us by the mile if we will reach for Him by the inch. He will assume the trappings of whatever occasion we present Him, so great is His love. All He asks is a heart eager to embrace the truth of scripture, and to surrender to His authority and primacy in our lives.
Life has this quality of intensity and withdrawal about it too. We sometimes are insistent and aggressive in our search for God, and sometimes we are passive and receptive. The irony is that in all this searching and reaching, God finds us rather than we finding God. It is as T.S. Eliot wrote:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
ATTRIBUTION: T. S. ELIOT, “Little Gidding,” last stanza, Collected Poems, 1909–1962, p. 208 (1963).
