Run away, run away

Why do people of faith go on retreat? What is a retreat anyway?

They have run away.

That is what a retreat is, you know. It is a time to flee. It is a time to leave one state of being and enter another. We hope when we retreat we will find refuge, quiet, and calm. We retreat from the noise, stress, and babble of life as it is. We want to find that Seventh Day sort of calm--God at rest with all creation with God. In our world, that means we have to run away to a place called a “retreat center,” just so the world knows what it is and perhaps will hold it down outside the confines of said place. Knowing that may not happen, most retreat centers are somewhere else, somewhere removed from the world. We put them in mountains, out in the country, in the desert, or in a barren place--somewhere “away.” 

We hope.

The thing is we take ourselves with us when we run away. We take who we are, what is happening to us, and how we are in the midst of all that right into the middle of the retreat. So we find ourselves perched on a rock trying to meditate, commune with God, and be in that moment, only to battle thoughts about the argument we had with a coworker two days before we left that sits back home like a stinkbug. Or the bill that kept us awake at home still keeps us awake at 300 AM in the unfamiliar bed of the lodge. Or the aging parent who needs ever more care and attention rises in our minds as the retreat focuses on the practice of compassionate care for others. We ran away, but everything ran right after us and--ouch--CAUGHT US! 

So, a retreat is something more than just running away. In its quiet, lack of distraction, and calming lack of schedule, it becomes a moment not to flee all that ails us, but to deeply enter it.

Ironic? Counterintuitive? 

Yes, but that is the nature of faith practice--it succeeds in nourishing us most deeply through the very things we often name contradictory--the more we give, the more we gain; the more we empty ourselves, the fuller we become; the more we lose ourselves, the more readily we find who we are; the more we enter doubt, the more certainty actually begins to arise; and so on. 

So, a retreat allows us a safe place to enter what drove us into the wilderness in the first place. We can enter the suffering we feel, knowing we are surrounded by graceful hands and hearts to help us. We can enter the suffering we feel, knowing that here there is space and time in which to discover the ineffable presence of God. We can enter the suffering we experience, knowing that here there is hope that it is finite and limited in its scope. We can enter the confusion of our existence and find clarity through taking time to breathe, to open ourselves to the presence of others and God, and find healing and hearing. 

And on go the gifts of retreat. 

So, we may well have run away, but we also ran into--into the presence of God, into the fold of our community, and into the sanctuary in which to see again that we are all children of God.