CCU Silent Retreat 2011 – Day One
“So what do I do?” one of my retreat students asked me.
“Whatever you want to do,” I replied.
The student had the look of a person just being given the recommendation to jump off a cliff. There was a mixture of horror and confusion.
“I’m not sure what I want to do. I mean, everything that I have ever been doing over the last semester or so has always been assigned to me. I mean, I just never have entertained the possibility that I might even get to choose something to do.”
“I can understand that. We often don’t think about or even give ourselves the opportunity to explore the possibility of what we actually want to do. It seems like such a waste, right? After all, even if I knew what I “wanted” to do doesn’t necessarily mean that I will get to do it.”
“Exactly! Why bother “dreaming” about what I want to do when I won’t be able to do it anyway?” A deep sigh issued forth expressing the frustration and mild despair the thought brought.
Something like that conversation was the beginning of two different retreats I have had the honor to be a part of with students from CCU. This small group of courageous students walked and listened, and discussed God’s voice by creating a space to listen in the silence of Sacred Heart Retreat House. I will let them tell you in their own words what it was like. It was another amazing time to watch God touch lives in ways I rarely get the opportunity to see let alone experience it myself. Just remember that silence is creating space to hear God in the internal realm of our soul like solitude is creating a physical space to experience God. I trust and am sure you will be touched by their brutally honest words and reflections they will share with you through this medium. Each will not be identified. They will simply be identified as retreatant #1, 2, 3, or 4. Read with joy at what God can do with a soul whose “eyes” are turned toward Him.
Retreatant #2
April 8, 2011
I’d be the first one to say that I had so many expectations coming into this weekend, regardless of whether or not I would’ve admitted it then. I had so many un-surfaced expectations that sort of melted their way into my entire morning, though not in a way that I so acknowledged them in that way. Hindsight, as in just the brief period that was lunch and shortly thereafter, I can tell you that I pushed and pushed for stillness with God this morning. I pushed so that I could hear His voice. I came into this weekend with numerous things on my list: I needed clarity on this, I needed healing from this, I needed to work through this, I need to work on changing this, etc. I had my weekend planned to a T of what “God was going to teach me” as I spent the weekend in silence. However, in hiking this morning, I found myself in the midst of cluttered, aimless thoughts and I found myself actually coaching myself to “be still”. By lunchtime though I found that instead of any answers or solutions, I seemed to have more questions, many of them pointing back at me. Which really frustrated and, in some ways, angered me. My thoughts ran something like this: I came on this retreat so that God could teach me something profound so that I can gallivant back to real life with newfound healing, wisdom, and insightfulness. Didn’t I? Many people knew that I was going on this retreat, so I need to come back with some incredible knowledge learned, right? With these thoughts running through my head, I couldn’t make this morning seem completely useless so I picked out some ‘good’ things and left my not-yet-known pushiness out of my last journal entry. As I returned to my room to prepare for my afternoon outside, I read something profound that hit me like a ton of bricks…
“I would like to beg you…as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and do, try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language. Don’t search for answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer”.
After reading this, I just sat on my bed and began to cry. Why is it that I’m pressing so hard for answers? It’s as if as long as I’m pressing and searching for answers, then I’m in control of what I have to confront. And it’s as if I believe that “when” I find the answer, then that will be that and I won’t have any future doubts about that one thing, or I will change and be that different person whom the “answer” defines. In a sense, I guess it’s my own twisted way of trying to manipulate God so that I only hear what I want to hear. And when I think about that I can’t help but realize how wrong it is, but it seems to be the best fit description for what I have been doing.
I headed outside to the Agony in the Garden sculpture, sat down, and read a few passages of Scripture that helped me to reflect upon Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. Upon finishing my reading, I immediately began thinking about what profound thought I could come up with, when a still small voice quieted those thoughts with a simple, “just be still”. And that’s exactly what I did. Physically and mentally, I just remained still. And it was in this stillness that I learned something so simple, and yet so profound that I could have never “thought it up on my own”.
Child, stop running yourself rampant, searching and seeking for answers. Instead, be still, and seek Me.
It was in this moment that, for the first time, I caught a small glimpse of the beauty of what it means to be still before the Lord.
